The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Version 4
by amiddle
Summary: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book, of which version 4.0 is a wholly remarkable excerpt from which, for copyright reasons, all Guide entries authored by field researchers other than amiddle811879, have been deleted.
1. The Frontispiece

DISCLAIMER: Not every article, if any, in the Hitchhikers Guide is entirely accurate. This is partly because factual articles are dry and humourless, and mainly because most Field researchers submit their articles after exceptionally long lunch breaks.

_See Error Messages._

It should be noted, however, that the Hitchhikers' Guide still contains more truth than any comparable tome. This is because every other book is governed by a strict editorial policy aimed at avoiding legal action from those who might potentially be offended by the content they produce.

The reason that the Guide has such a lax editorial policy is because, most of the time, its editorial staff are out to lunch in the sleaziest, most extravagant, most controversial eateries that money can buy. And the reason that the Hitchhikers' Guide has succeeded in avoiding major litigation is because the people they are treating to lunch are invariably senior members of the judiciary.

That and the fact that another editorial policy is that all lunches are secretly filmed.

A Note on Version Control

There have, in fact, been a number of different editions of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, of which this is, probably, the latest. For ease of use, and to ensure that you can tell these different versions apart, it is perhaps worth explaining what, where and how they differ.

**Guide 1.0**

The First Edition looks rather like a largish electronic calculator. It has about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" can be summoned at a moment's notice.

It looks insanely complicated, and this is one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fits into has the words Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters.

The Guide is published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component because if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

It has three settings: Text, Voice, and Composite.

Few first editions exist because the Guide is designed to receive updates to its database via Sub-Etha. Field researchers (like Ford Prefect) can also use the Guide to edit entries and transmit these back to the publisher. Only editions that have either travelled to a point in time and space beyond the upgrade, or that have had their receiver circuits fried, can be described as First Editions.

**Note:** field researcher editions come with small memory dump modules for the saving and uploading of entries.

**Guide 1.1**

Revised Editions are identical to the first, except that they aren't.

The software has been upgraded to increase their capacity and functionality. This upgrade affects not just the content of the Guide, but also its appearance. It now resembles a small, thin, flexible lap computer.

Where the first edition had a around a million pages the revised edition has in excess of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine. This upgrade also includes three important features:

1.the voice of the book has changed

2.It has added a fourth setting: Holographic

3.In order to ensure that the guide is never separated from its owner, whoever was in possession of the Guide at the time of its software upgrade (or, if it is a rare first-hand copy straight out of the box, its new owner) will have developed a symbiotic link. This means that the Guide will is extremely difficult to lose or otherwise get rid of.

The default hologram is of a Megadodo, a now extinct bird whose image was adopted as the logo for the Guide's publisher, Megadodo Publications. A variety of alternate skins are available is the user wants to personalise his copy.

**Guide 2.0**

_See Media Piracy._

**Guide 3.0**

Following an attempted product recall that has since been unhappened as a result of media piracy, a reissue of the revised edition has been made available in a variety of colours. This version folds out like a real book and fills the available space on its interior. This sacrifices all the fiddly buttons in exchange for a colourful widescreen format.

**Guide 4.0**

A limited 'open source' release with no Voice or Composite function, this edition – also called the text edition – was released for streamed Sub-Etha download to any device on any planet. Each edition is therefore tailored to the language and pedagogy of the world it was supplied to (an Earth edition can, for example, be downloaded via the internet or mobile phones).

It should be noted that, for copyright reasons, all Guide entries authored by field researchers with entry codes not prefixed by the three letter acronym ARM, have been deleted.


	2. The History of the Altairan Dollar

**Altairan Dollar (History)**

In the great and prosperous times before the collapse of the Galactic Economy, the Altair System was renowned for its riches and its complex, multi-layered social hierarchy. At the very top of this structure sat the High Altairan Court of Icons, whole sole function in life was to be looked up to by the rich and famous, revered by the upper classes, worshipped by the upper middle classes, adored by the middle classes, and prayed to by those too far down the social order to be bothered with.

Among the nobles of the High Altairan Court food and the etiquette involved in consuming it were the two most important facets of their lives, from using the right shade of saffron lemon to accompany the pre-entrée, to extending the thumb and little finger when toasting the arrival of the anti-post-après-dessert liqueurs. Indeed a typical fourteen course breakfast would require more than twenty different types of spoon.

These spoons and were so central to the members of the High Court's ability to function, that different metals and gemstones were used to differentiate the pea sporks from the cream ladles, until more than a quarter of the total wealth of the High Altairan Court was invested in cutlery, while the other three quarters were rumoured to have been invested in the food.

Of course, the nobles of the Court were so stinking rich they didn't even notice this, and their delegation of cutlery control to the lower orders was a disaster in the making. With such a complex system finding the right cutlery became a nightmare, as did keeping the kitchen staff, who would often last only a day before disappearing with a drawer-full of jewel-encrusted spoons, never to be seen again.

There came a time (later known as the Great Spoon Famine) when the demand for new cutlery exceeded the supply, and a shortage of spoons came to threaten the Altairan status quo. To the High Altairan Court the need to use the right spoon for the job was so great that having no spoon meant eating no food.

In less than a month the uncompromisingly obese Altairan nobility had, despite an overabundance of food and money, starved itself into extinction, their corpulent and fat-reliant bodies were completely unprepared for the sudden and terminal end to the intake of food.

The loss of an entire tier of Altairan Society unburdened the planet from many of its debts, but also resulted in money flooding back into the local economy, rather than paying for mineral mines and exotic food-farms on other planets. With so much currency around, the value of the Old Altairan Dollar slumped, and the planet spiralled into what was known as the Great Depression.

In order to survive, the rest of Altairan society was forced to use stolen cutlery as its principle currency. While this accelerated the Galaxy's move towards a moneyless system, the different types of spoon were officially recognised as the system's new currency. Thus Altair had at last recognised the true value of the spoon, and the New Altairan Dollar was born.

And herein lies the real reason that hitchhikers need to live on less than 30 Altairan Dollars per day. Any more than thirty spoon-shaped dollars carried on any given day would weigh them down so much, and would make finding the right change so difficult, that they'd be likely to find themselves a spoon too short to pay their bills.


	3. Arcturan Megacommandos

**Arcturan Megacommandos**

It is interesting to note that many Arcturan Megacommandos are neither Arcturan, nor Mega.

In the annals of galactic military history there has been no wilder, braver or crazier combat unit than the legendary Arcturan Megacommandos. Not only are they the most scandalous, ill-disciplined and badly behaved soldiers in the entire galaxy, but they are also the most feared, relying on hair raising jokes and wild stunts to achieve their objectives without so much as an energy bolt being unleashed.

For these guys teleporting naked into an enemy combat armed only with large and menacing vegetables is an everyday occurrence, and usually comes between imbibing large volumes of alcohol and planting their flag in the netherparts of the commanding officer responsible for the operation.

Given that most armed forces have long since been decommissioned, the Arcturan Megacommandos are often seen as a warmongering anachronism in an age of peace and enlightenment. In truth, they are just like all the other out-of-work party-goers surviving in a galaxy suffering from 90 unemployment.


	4. Arthur Philip Dent

**Arthur Philip Dent**

Arthur Philip Dent is a human of ape-descent who is dark-haired, 6 feet tall and approximately 30 years of age. His formative years were spent in the South East of England in the northern hemisphere of the planet known as Earth. He drank tea, had a comfortable job in radio, a small dog and an attractive cottage, all of which were lost when the Earth was demolished to make way for an Interstellar Hyperspace Bypass. What exactly was being bypassed has never been determined.

Thanks to the efforts of his best friend Ford, to the improbability of being reunited with his former crush Tricia MacMillan, and to the mysterious and not entirely logical plans of Zaphod Beeblebrox, Arthur was saved.

In a relatively short space of time the permanently bewildered Arthur Dent learned to hitchhike, travelled to the end of the universe, stumbled upon a few of the universe's more obscure secrets, ended up in the distant past, learned to fly, returned to a new Earth (Mark 2.0), met and fell in love with a lady called Fenchurch, lost her, discovered a daughter he didn't know he had ever had, and ended up dying multiple times as the universe tried to sort out the general mess he had left it in.

By sheer luck, Arthur had been accompanied throughout his adventures by a Babel Fish which, driven by a incredibly strong sense of preservation, teleported itself - along with Arthur - to a place of relative safety, from whence his improbable adventures have continued.


	5. Babelgrams

**Babelgrams**

The many uses to which Babel fish have been put over the years has largely been due to their sheer versatility. Where some cultures use the term "like a fish out of water" to describe a situation where they feel uncomfortable having found themselves in an unfamiliar situation, galactic society used the expression to mean that someone is adaptable and highly likely to survive whatever the circumstances.

When removed from their native aquatic environment the Babel fish are quick to find a suitable new environment in which to thrive. It is this survival instinct that drew the Babel fish to the bodily orifices of their hosts in the first place.

For this reason the most common form of acquiring a Babel fish is from a custom-built dispenser unit designed to ease the transition from an aquatic environment into an aural one. In practice, however, the expectations of the dispenser user are often at odds with the design of the device itself. As such the most effective means of transferring fish to ear is to place a receptacle (a satchel will do) in front of the unit (weighed down by something not too light and not too heavy – say, some junk mail), cover any drains that may be on the floor in the vicinity for the dispenser (with a towel, for example), use an item of clothing to make a tube between the dispenser unit and the receptacle, and then push dispenser button.

If these precautions are not followed the fish may not end up in either the receptacle or your ear, shifting sideways into an alternative layer of reality on the Probability Curve to avoid destruction.

Care must also be taken when inserting the Babel fish into your ear, as one false move could result in it inhabiting a different bodily orifice altogether. While such incidents have finally answered the question "are faeces sentient?" and have enabled a number of Babel fish users to develop inner monologues involving the opinions of various gut parasites and other friendly bacteria, they have primarily been responsible for the development of the Babelgram.

The Babelgram is a means of allowing members of one society to remotely communicate with members of another across the vast distance of space.

The Babel fish, you see, is not the only symbiotic creature likely to inhabit a living body. Another, equally hardy creature vaguely related to its piscine peer, is the Mermaids Purse Nematode.

The Mermaids Purse Nematode is an intestinal parasite whose microscopic eggs hatch in the gut of its host, causing it to grow into an envelope-like sac whose only function is to absorb nutrients and to fill up with lots of eggs. Once it has left the body and laid its eggs the sac is incredibly tough, and the carcasses of dead nematodes are often used as flame-retardant jiffy bags.

But back to the Babel fish.

When a Babel fish enters a gut occupied by a Mermaids Purse Nematode, the sac opens to unleash its eggs, allowing the Babel fish to pass inside. Here it feeds on the nematode's somewhat limited brainwave energy, translating its memories into words in much the same way as it does with other organic hosts.

However, being a symbiote, the Mermaids Purse Nematode has no thoughts of its own. Instead it absorbs the thoughts of its organic host or, once out of the body, the thoughts of the last organic creature to touch it. As long as the Babel fish remains inside, this imprint stays with the nematode until it comes into contact with another organic creature.

For this reason specially coated jiffy-bags are used to transport Babel fish all across the length and breadth of the galaxy, carrying messages of peace, goodwill, and notices of impending legal action.


	6. The Belgium Virus

**The Belgium Virus**

The word Belgium is considered to be the rudest word in the universe, and is completely banned in all parts of the Galaxy, except in one part, where they don't know what it means.

Precisely because the word is banned it is easy for civilisations to forget exactly why the term became so offensive.

Indeed some years ago, during the Presidency of the legendary Yooden Vranx, various bans were being reviewed and overturned as a matter of course. For example, and despite violent protests, the ban on Brockian Ultra-Cricket was maintained. In contrast, a fishing ban on the sparkling blue ocean world of Damogran was lifted without an eyebrow being raised.

In reviewing the ban on the word Belgium, it was found that its origins had become so obscure that an exploratory mission comprised of the galaxy's greatest epigrammatists, dialecticians and etymologists would have to be despatched to find the true origins of the word. This knowledge would then be genetically programmed into the race memories of every species in the universe - just to be sure.

After many months of painstaking research the mission discovered that there were only two locations in the entire universe where the term Belgium was in use. The first, a sparkling blue ocean world known as Earth, was considered harmless and had such a low level of interaction with the universe at large that they chose to ignore it. The second was, coincidentally, the even more sparkling and even more blue ocean world known as Damogran.

Belgium is a small abandoned Damogranian island some 30,000 km². According to the records, a small mountain lake somewhere to the north of the island was said to have been the legendary home of the first Babel fish. It was also the home of the first genetically modified Babel fish farm.

According to the locals of Damogran, the term Belgium had been used exclusively as a unit of measurement used by the local tri-D media to enable size comparisons of large areas to be made (for example "Wales is three times the size of Belgium"). This in turn led to a colloquialism, microBelgiums, being used to define a small area roughly the same size as a Brockian Ultra-Cricket Pitch.

This, of course, had no bearing upon why the word Belgium was banned, although by association it does explain why Brockian Ultra-Cricket might have been.

And so, undeterred by the distraction of linguistic deviations, the mission travelled to Belgium itself, from whence all but one of its party were never to return.

The sole survivor of the mission, Vlard Harfelbard, returned, only moderately insane, to the galactic core. There he recounted the origins of Belgium and its offensive nature. He also revealed the terrible truth behind the genetically modified Babel fish farm. It had, he revealed, been an attempt to reprogram the Babel fish's telepathic matrix and thus replace the word Belgium with the more innocuous sounding word "fk".

The experiment had, of course, gone terribly wrong (some blamed an Act of God), and resulted in the entire Damogranian Babel fish stock being infected with a virus so terrible it was spoken of in hushed tones as... the Belgium Virus.

So it was decided that under no circumstances should genetic reprogramming ever be considered as a means of removing the word Belgium from the Galactic consciousness. The origins of the word were secured in a vault for all eternity, whilst a fleet of special officers from the Imperial Galactic Government (i.e. Vogons) were despatched to re-enforce the fishing ban on Damogran.

Oblivious to the imminent ban on Damogranian Babel fishing a young researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide, despatched to report upon the lifting of the ban, picked up a couple of infected Babel fish and promptly introduced the Belgium Virus to the rest of the universe.


	7. The Big Bang Burger Bar

**The Big Bang Burger Bar**

The Big Bang Burger Bar is a renowned eatery that exists at the beginning of the universe, namely the Big Bang. Established following the success of Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the Bar has struggled to survive for several reasons:

First, it is almost impossible to travel back to the very beginning of time because it is so far in the past.

Second, the cost of transporting food, staff and customers back to the very beginning of time is extremely prohibitive. It is for this reason that the bar serves poor quality snack food instead of gourmet food.

Third, the bar's failure to turn a tidy profit has resulted in countless failed takeovers and disastrous marketing campaigns. It has therefore been known by a number of other names, including The Big Bang Burger Barn, The Big Bang Burger Chef and The Big Bang Burger Shack.


	8. Conservation Terrorism

**Conservation Terrorism**

It is a sad fact that most emerging civilizations learn the shocking truth about the need for conservation, ecology and environmental sustainability at around the same time that their scientists reveal that their planet is about to enter a terminal phase brought about by dirty manufacturing, fossil fuel exhaustion, nuclear blight and ozone depletion.

These sudden rises in global temperatures, exponential increases in global catastrophes and inevitable plunge into global ice ages invariable leads to the mass extinction of flora and fauna unless those responsible (a) hibernate until the planet recovers, (b) find another planet to migrate to, or (c) find somewhere to put the pollution and somewhere else to replace to acquire replacements for its depleted resources.

Given the incredibly long timescales and the vast amount of manufacturing and fuel resources needed to put an entire population to sleep or to send star ships to the nearest planet, conservation has often been the stop-gap measure by which a doomed civilization might survive.

Conservation terrorism relies upon the creation of a rift between two similar parallel worlds to:

Facilitate the wholesale migration of the population from a world of depleted resources to one where they can start all over again;

Send in resource extraction teams to find replacement resources – food, oil, water, oxygen – to sustain their population until something better comes along;

Vent excess pollutants such as carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and nuclear waste so that global warming shifts from one version of their home world to another.

Unfortunately, the planets targeted by conservation terrorists are often populated with remarkably similar civilizations, whose reaction to fly tipping on a global scale is often to send a large number of thermonuclear warheads back through the rifts, resulting in higher levels of pollution than had existed in the first place.


	9. Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom is a term used by scientists to imply some level of consensus by experts. Those hearing the expression are meant to infer that it some how represents the established view or preferred understanding when, in fact, it means "I'm about to contradict this, I don't want to make an assertion, and I can't be bothered to quote my sources".

The quoting, or more commonly, misquoting of sources is a particular bugbear for the scientific establishment, particularly as the purpose of scientific assertions is to discredit, undermine or otherwise trash the many years that other scientists have spent studying and researching on the long road to Intergalactic Acclaim.

It is, in fact, unconventional wisdom that most scientists seek to build their work upon, identifying a credible and logical definition of largely incredible and chaotic phenomenon. For every scientific principle accepted as conventional wisdom there are a hundred or more vying to replace it, using wilder and more obscure evidence as a means of fathoming the unfathomable and verifying the unverifiable.


	10. Cops

**Cops**

Most cops, it has to be said, have absolutely no idea how to do their jobs. A recent survey carried out on behalf of the Imperial Galactic Employment Service by the University of Maximegalon's Department of Statistical Distortion shows that 275 of all Galactic Cops joined their respective constabularies because it seemed like the most fun you could have without breaking the law.

The cops who don't know how to do their jobs spend most of the time patrolling the Galaxy looking for trouble, chasing down whoever takes their fancy (allegedly speeders and outlaws, although most turn out to be members of alien minorities or jerks), according to what mood they happen to be in at the time.

By way of contrast, the cops who do know what they are doing use their informer network to find out where the trouble is and then spend all of their time turning up at the places where there isn't any, thus maintaining their sedentary donut-eating lifestyle whilst reporting back how they have succeeded in keeping crime figures down in their patrol zones.

With such high levels of amorality, the typical galactic police force (among them the Corewards Highway Patrol, the Western Spiral Rangers and the Outer Rim Guards) is riddled with maladministration, bribery and corruption, with many of its martial resources committed to resolving turf wars between rival backwater police stations.

Of particular note is the fact that most cops suffer from emotional irregularities which leave them as merciless, trigger-happy bigots who enforce the law as they see it, rather than it is actually written (in its executive summary the University of Maximegalon's Department of Statistical Distortion noted that literacy is not cited as an entry requirement for a career as a cop).

They attempt to compensate for this by kidding themselves into believing they are sensitive, artistic, and highly cultured, and some of them have even been known to take their work seriously, although when such rare cases do occur they tend to find themselves reassigned to the outer fringes of the galaxy.

**Note:** The second worst insult you can give to a cop is to call him a dingo. The absolute worst insult you can give him is to call him a swatting dingo.


	11. Credit Cards

**Credit Cards**

The Credit Card is a small piece of plastic that is incredibly easy to acquire, but terribly difficult to get rid of.

The credit card was designed for two reasons:

First, it allowed a financial transaction to be carried out without the user (a) having any hard currency in his pocket, or (b) having any hard currency in his bank account.

Second, it allowed the banks to make money from their service to customers without (a) actually spending any money of their own, or (b) actually providing a service.

Credit cards come in only one size, shape and specification which, surprisingly, has managed to accommodate the needs of every galactic species ever encountered. This masterpiece of design engineering has allowed the credit card to be used anywhere and everywhere in the universe.

How the credit card came to have such a simple specification was, until its revelation here, a secret closely guarded by the secret society of Senior Brantisvogan Galactibank Executives that originally came up with it.

The society decided that the existence of a universally accepted form of credit card would ensure their perpetual grip on galactic society. Such a card therefore had to be usable by every single species across the totality of time and space.

For this reason the credit card predates the existence of all life in the universe.

The logic runs thus: The evolution of organic life is based upon its ability to tune into a pre-existing biological template through a process known as morphic resonance. In other words, once the development of a particular form of organic or abstract life has taken place it will provide feedback into the morphic field from which future life forms will evolve. So the oldest life form in the universe will have determined the size and shape of every other life form that followed it.

"Thus," the credit card designers reasoned, "if we come up with a design that has both organic and abstract components, and then send it back to a time before life existed, the credit card will establish the morphic field from which all life will evolve. Thus all organic forms of life will evolve to be able to use such a card, while all abstract forms of life will develop the urge to use it."

So what does a credit card actually do?

Simply put, the credit card rotates the balance of a customer's account transactions in order to maximise the Galactibanks' profits in the form of interest and late payment fees.

This involves the removal of bank charges before payment is due, so that the customer has never paid enough of their balance off to (a) clear previously accrued debts, or (b) anticipate the cost of future bank charges.

The reason that all of this is possible is because the Galactibanks are extremely large, and allegedly have branches in every corner of the universe.

In truth, the Galactic Banking Grid is a network capable of conducting all of its transactions faster than the speed of light. Transactions are not, however, instantaneous. All transactions travel from the point of sale to the point of payment along carefully plotted vectors that bisect the Galaxy's various time zones. This ensures that, regardless of how quickly the transaction actually takes place, its apparent duration makes the Galactibanks lots and lots of interest.

For this reason it is commonplace for a credit card application to be submitted along with a bankruptcy declaration.

However distasteful the use of credit cards may be for the individual, they are still considered to be essential tools for business. The amount of productivity gained and efficiency saved by placing all of its transactions onto credit cards makes the charges paid to the Galactibanks the cheapest way of managing a Megacorporation's finances.

Especially when employees receive company credit cards in lieu of actual wages.

This is because the Megacorporations, like the Galactibanks, have offices and operatives in every corner of the universe. Just as the Galactic Banking Grid calculates the slowest possible apparent route for transactions to appear to take place, the Megacorporations are busy working out the fastest probable route for these transactions, and employ Corporate Network Saboteurs to manipulate the grid into minimising their debt and maximising their profits.

The natural by-product of these interactions is the secret war that has raged unchecked between the Corporate Network Saboteurs and the Galactibank SysOps for thousands of years, much to the annoyance of the Intergalactic insurance industry, whose claims departments spend most of their time footing the bill.


	12. Death and Taxes

**Death and Taxes**

It has long been believed that there are only two constants in the galaxy: death and taxes.

Indeed, in many cases it was the threat of death by global catastrophe and avoidance of spiralling taxation that caused many civilizations to leave their home worlds to find life on planets devoid of ground rents or oxygen duty.

So it was, in the early days of galactic society, that life in space was short but relatively tax free. The jurisdiction of local revenue departments was tied to planetary boundaries and rarely stretched beyond the increasingly profitable atmosphere of their overpopulated home worlds.

However, the evolution of virtual boundaries between expanding intergalactic cultures soon led to intraplanetary trade and the birth of the free galactic trade associations. As more and more revenue was leeched off world, the various galactic governments introduced import and export duties in a series of desperate attempts to stabilise and grow their economies.

This worked well, encouraging the growth of the Megacorporations and the Galactibanks until their reliance upon each other turned into a clandestine war. The only casualty of this war was the Insurance Industry, whose collapse triggered the First Great Galactic Depression.

At the time of the depression there was only one publicly funded body whose remit covered the whole of the galaxy – the Intergalactic Glee Group. This club had been founded several years earlier by a disgruntled local government employee called Figg Jeffers, who had considered his world to be so behind the times that he sought funding to set up a programme of intraplanetary conferences where civil servants from all the different planetary governments could network, exchange best practice, and share jokes.

Not long afterwards, in response to the growing economic crisis, a few forward thinking governments attempted to establish an interim Imperial Galactic Government, but at their first hurdle found themselves sued into non-existence for accidentally using the same trademarked logo as the Intergalactic Glee Group.

So it was that the insurance industry turned not to the fledgling Imperial Galactic Government, but to Figg Jeffers for assistance. Accepting the challenge, Jeffers appointed himself as Chief Executive and Emperor of the hastily reconstituted Imperial Galactic Government, and introduced the first galaxy-wide tax hike to save the insurers and pay for even more pointless networking events.

Jeffers' tax was known as Ubiquitous Value Duty, arguing that every commodity or service in the galaxy that could be determined to have value should have a fixed percentage creamed off the top and siphoned away into Imperial Galactic Government coffers.

Offering loans to underwrite the struggling insurance companies in return for a mind bogglingly large number of shares, Jeffers soon abdicated his position in favour of the current Imperial lineage.

It wasn't long before Jeffers' successors realised that some things have more value than others. With this in mind, they began to shift away from the flat-rate-for-everything approach.

Having inherited responsibility for the galactic economy, the Empire soon found itself responsible for the burgeoning unemployment caused by the growth in artificial intelligences, robots and other time saving devices. Realising that with every tax-hike there would be repercussions, the Emperor decided to create a new role – that of the Imperial Galactic President – to take responsibility for everything that went wrong with the economy without actually being burdened with making any of the decisions.

The first Presidential resignation quickly followed the announcement of Unemployment and Retirement Duties. The former was a tax placed upon employers, requiring them to pay the Government unemployment benefit in advance of making unwanted staff redundant. The latter was a duty paid by employees in return for the government allowing them to retire.

This led to a major investment in longevity research. Employers wanted to get the best value out of their employees by extending the usefulness of their lives, while employees were looking for ways to live long enough to save up enough money to pay the tax needed to let them enjoy retirement before they died.

Longevity and Practical Immortality soon became the norm, giving the Imperial Galactic Government even more opportunities to generate revenue.

For those who sought to prolong their lives through clone arrangements, the IGG responded by imposing inheritance tax, charging the new body an exorbitant sum in return for inheriting its predecessor's memories; for those who decided to give up on organic life, donating their engrams to the makers of Genuine People Personalities, the Imperial Galactic Government introduced the one-off Personality Transfer Tax; and for those who chose to extend their life with transplants, creams, nutrient baths, death cheating diets or by entering stasis long enough to accrue tenure benefits from their employers, the IGG responded with the much-resented longevity tax.

It was at this point that death became a worthwhile proposition. All of the legislation and revenue plans were geared towards those people who prolonged their lives. For those rich enough to pay in advance to have their bodies preserved at the moment of death a tax loophole emerged. Being legally dead they had no status for tax purposes, and interest on their debts could not be accrued. Interest on their tax-free savings, however, would continue to grow. Thus a temporarily dead googolquillionaire could be resurrected decades later and never have to worry about back taxes.

The Imperial Galactic Government quickly responded, closing the loophole with the introduction of death duty and the resurrection tax, preventing many dead-wannabes from committing fiscal suicide and forcing the many already-late entrepreneurs to remain deceased until a change in legislation could be introduced.

Many pundits have seen this latest move as the final nail in the coffin of the Imperial galactic Revenue Service, speculating that it may hasten a long-expected revolution.


	13. Deep Thought

**Deep Thought**

Deep Thought claims to be the second greatest computer in the history of the universe. It was constructed by hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings, and set the task of calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Deep Thought, of course, had better things to do with its time, and convinced its creators that the answer would require some seven and a half million years of calculation.

What Deep Thought did during this seven and a half million year period is unknown, although there is evidence to suggest that it was responsible for a number of very high profile and extremely profitable ventures including the creation of the Magrathean Planet Yards, building a near-infinite computational matrix at the End of the Universe, designing a variety of highly improbable devices including the Point of View Gun and the now legendary Hypergalactic Space-time Positioning System fitted as standard in all vessels capable of achieving faster than light speeds.

Deep Thought has also been accused of using its vast knowledge and ability to travel through time and space to mastermind a campaign of industrial espionage designed to secure its reputation as the second greatest computer in the history of the universe. These competitors included Hactar of Striterax, the Milliard Gargantubrain, the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity, the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus 12, the Multicorticoid Perspicutron Titan Muller and the Pondermatic.

As to how Deep Thought calculated the answer, there are a number of theories suggesting that it did so by travelling into the future to a time when the question was already known. With this knowledge Deep Thought was able to calculate the answer before returning to report to its creators that it was 42.

Deep Thought claims not know the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything, but is clearly aware that the answer and the question are mutually exclusive, and that knowing both at the same time will result in the destruction of the universe.

In spite of this, Deep Thought designed what he claimed to be an even more powerful computer to calculate the question. After ten million years of calculation, the Earth was destroyed approximately five minutes before the completion of its programme.

It has been suggested that Deep Thought knew that this would happen all along, or else that it somehow arranged it.


	14. Detectives

**Detectives**

There are two types of detective. There are the perverts, driven by the desire to spy on people and discover their deepest darkest secrets, thus making money from their victims, criminals, lawyers, paparazzi and nosy neighbours through a combination of smarm and blackmail, and there are the jaded altruists, who once believed that somebody had to clean up the galaxy until they discovered that being dirty was its natural state.

Detectives are, it has to be said, more intelligent than cops, and take no greater pleasure than to obstruct them in their miscarriage of justice. Because of their higher reasoning skills, they tend to given cases that cops cannot handle without an ensuing bloodbath. These might include spying on faithless spouses, tracking down lost property or stolen pets, shadowing the debtors of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, seeking out tax evaders and generally obtaining information likely to cause distress.

Every detective has a preferred methodology, from which there are many to choose. There are alcoholic detectives who drink their suspects under the table, ballistic detectives who extract all the information they need at the end of a gun, consulting detectives who concoct wild theories based on obscure and largely irrelevant information, forensic detectives who desperately try to examine all the available evidence, gigolistic detectives who sleep with people for information, googolistic detectives who do all their work sitting a computer terminal, holistic detectives who consider the interconnectedness of all things, neurolinguistic detectives who determine guilt according to stereotypes, psychic detectives who read minds, and pugilistic detectives who beat the crap out of people to acquire the information that they need.

Regardless of style, detectives are a stubborn, hardy breed who, when they're not taking time out to help the police with their enquiries are doubtless indulging themselves in jumping to very complex, and most probably wrong, conclusions.


	15. Directory Enquiries

**Directory Enquiries**

Galactic Directory Enquiries are operated by unpaid volunteers working for the Universal Operator Enquiry Service.

Following the enforced recall of the its Genuine People Personality Prototypes (for unspecified reasons that may or may not involve a Paranoid Android), the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation agreed to set up a network of Retirement Homes for Personality Challenged Robots, whose residents now form the backbone of the Universal Operator Enquiry Service.

_See also Telecommunications._


	16. The End of the Universe

**The End of the Universe**

According to conventional wisdom there are at least three phases involved in the end of the universe (Many of the less enlightened civilisations in the galaxy offer the three major theories of universal doom as mutually exclusive alternatives, stating that if the universe is shape x and density y, then universal doom z must apply. Such obvious short-sightedness is believed to be a mere ruse to keep cosmologists and physicists in work. After all, once you actually know how the universe is going to end, what do you need them for?).

During the first stage, known as the Big Freeze, the Universe becomes too cold to sustain life to the action of entropy. Its continued expansion and the decay of free energy leads to a universe with a mean temperature of absolute zero. With no energy, particles have no force, and the atoms at the edge of the Universe slowly drift away towards infinity.

At this point the second phase, known as the Big Rip, takes place. As the Universe expands beyond the point at which it can be observed, it will eventually start to pull itself apart. In one final tug the mass of the invisible universe exerts pressure upon the fabric of the visible universe, tears a whole at the very centre.

This is where it gets interesting. The third phase of the end of the universe known as the Big Crunch. With the creation of a vast singularity at the heart of time and space, the pressure exerted by all the forces of creation is suddenly and catastrophically reversed, causing every iota of time and space to collapse in upon itself, until the entirety of the universe disappears with a resounding "wop".

There are of course many other theories of universal doom including the Big Banana, the Big Bounce, the Big Shift and the Big Twist, but they, along with the Big Three already mentioned, have long since been rendered moot by a man called Trin Tragula and a computer called Deep Thought.

A particularly henpecked member of the scientific fraternity, Trin Tragula – whose wife was forever nagging him for never putting things into the right proportion – decided to build a machine that would demonstrate exactly what a sense of proportion actually meant.

He did this by producing a virtual reality model of the universe which he extrapolated from a high-resolution scan of a small piece of fairy cake. Based on the axiom that any one piece of matter is affected by all other pieces of matter, he accidentally created an artificial universe which only intersected with the real universe through a singularity known as the Point of Total Perspective.

Another name for the Point of Total Perspective is the End of the Universe. By creating his universal model Tragula proved that when the Universe comes to an end all information will pass through a single point, accelerating exponentially faster than the time that the universe has left. Thus, in one single instant, all information in the universe passes beyond an event horizon where time itself stands still.

Of course, Tragula wasn't aware of this at the time of his discovery, and had already entered into negotiations with real estate developers to build a restaurant and theme park on the virtual universe equivalent of the planet where the Point of Total Perspective was created.

Depending upon your point of perspective, the Total Perspective Vortex was built in at least three different universes, if not all of them.

The first known home of the Total Perspective Vortex was the planet Brontitall, a planet renowned for its footwear-based economy. Here the point of singularity came to be mistakenly referred to as the Shoe Event Horizon.

The second known home of the Total Perspective Vortex was a planet known as Frogstar World B, home to the most evil race in the galaxy. There are many theories about why the most evil place in the galaxy might end up as the home of the Total Perspective Vortex, but the fact that the machine doubled as the most terrifying torture device in the universe might easily explain this.

The third and, to date, last known home of the Total Perspective Vortex was the Planet Magrathea, a world once occupied by hyper intelligent pan-dimensional beings responsible for building the second most powerful computer in the universe… Deep Thought.

In order to what they thought was going to be the greatest computer in the history of time and space, the hyper intelligent pan-dimensional beings reasoned that it had to have access to every scrap of information that history had to offer. In other words, the computer had to function at the Point of Total Perspective, from whence all things can be seen and all answers determined. So it was they built a Total Perspective Vortex whose singularity became the core of the planet Magrathea itself.

Of course, those Magratheans who ended up living on a planet with a singularity at its heart soon spotted a business opportunity. After all, with an unlimited amount of planets available to them, an unlimited amount of matter, and the ability to see everything from a godlike point of view, they did what any other highly advanced civilization would do.

They used it to make lots of money.

Deep Thought, meanwhile, was built with an operational matrix at the very end of the universe. The hyper intelligent pan-dimensional beings reasoned that any computer simulation run at the very end of time would continue forever in its own terms, even though the Universe the computer is in would last only a finite time. From here it was a simple matter for Deep Thought to see every possible answer to every possible question, relaying them back to his creators through the various avatars and interface points scattered across the many dimensions that collectively formed the universe.

It also meant that Deep Thought could provide any answer to any question in a span of time so short that most of its existence would not involve the processing of information, but the awaiting of instructions.

So it was that, when asked to calculate the ultimate answer to the ultimate question, Deep Thought decided to stall his creators. For a computer whose operational matrix existed at the very end of the universe, the very idea of having to calculate an answer when it already existed at the moment of time's last gasp was an absurdity. It took marginally longer for Deep Thought to transmit the information backwards through time than it did for it to extract and repeat the answer from the informational cascade that plummeted into the Point of Total Perspective.

However, there was one thing that Deep Thought did not know. A fact so complex it would take ten million years to run its programme. A question to which the answer was forty two.


	17. Eroticon VI

**Eroticon VI**

Few but the most pedantic cosmographical historians have heard of Pholus, a clarified gas giant deep within the Inner Spiral Arm of the Galaxy. Even fewer will have heard of its sixth companion moon, whose plains of rolling grass and loamy sand dunes made it one of the most fertile worlds in the galaxy.

So fertile was Pholus VI, in fact, that its dominant animal life-form bred so quickly that it spread across the surface of the planet faster than its competitors could evolve, removing the need for complex food chains. Without diverse species, there were no predators, and without predators, the herbivorous natives of Pholus VI learned to live in symbiotic harmony with the world's flora.

But life needs chaos and diversity, and over the years the near-immortal Pholans outlived their need to reproduce, and an ecological disaster threatened the planet. Unhindered by a single dominant species, the plant-life of Pholus evolved to bring diversity to the creatures it relied on for its own propagation, and eventually the Tree of Harmony was born.

First, the zest of its sumptuous fruits evolved into an aphrodisiac, reigniting the passion in older Pholans, encouraging them to reproduce well beyond their second or third centuries of life.

Second, the flesh of its sumptuous fruits evolved to regenerate their cells, reinvigorating them with youth and extending the upper age for childbirth well beyond what is normal for a Pholan.

The fruit of the Tree of Harmony has, of course, become one of the most sought after aphrodisiacs in the galaxy. But all of this happened long before the planet's accidental discovery by the Imperial Cartographical Survey Corps.

The final evolution of the Tree of Harmony lay within the seed husks of its sumptuous fruits. These husks, if eaten, would cause the Pholans to enter a state of hibernation, during which they would pupate, a shiny cocoon protecting them as their bodies were transformed and diversified.

Emerging from their cocoons, the Pholans would find themselves young again, but twice as big as before, with a new physical form. Where once they had been devoid of legs, the transformed Pholans became bipeds, and where Pholans had once been bipeds, a second course of Harmony Husks would turn them into quadrupeds. With the boost in size and limbage there were soon sextupeds, octopods, decapods and even centipods all over the moon.

Suddenly the ecology of Pholus VI was transformed, and the native fauna came in many shapes and sizes, each having different aptitudes and abilities. The two legged Pholans became dancers, the four-legged Pholans became sprinters, and the hundred-legged Pholans became freight trains.

And this was when the moon of Pholus VI was discovered, and word quickly spread. Here was a world whose fruit made you frisky, whose lithe dancers were young and in abundance, and whose sumptuous fruits could be turned into drugs which, when rubbed in as a skin cream or injected in the right spot could allow you to grow an extra limb.

The extra limbs were the clincher.

With so many races of varied shape and size, the idea of a planet whose entire population was both horny and able to meet the needs of aliens regardless of limb-quantity soon spread across the universe. The gas giant was renamed Eroticon, and the moon of Pholus VI became the much more well known Eroticon VI.

The Pholans, meanwhile, found the arrival of the pleasure industry to be a great boon, bringing a diversity of races to their home world, and making the aptitudes of their two and four-legged citizens in great demand. So happy were the bipeds and the quadrupeds (now rebranded as the Centaurpedes of Eroticon VI), that they would often leave the planet to avoid exposure to the seed husks of the Tree of Harmony, because they really didn't want to be bothered with extra legs.

In contrast with the Pholan migration, many pleasure workers came to Eroticon VI precisely because of the extra limbs that it offered. The most famous of these migrants was, of course, Eccentrica Gallumbits, whose horror at the sexploitation of the native Pholans led to her establishing a nature reserve, protected from intruders by an exceptionally powerful erogenous zone that prevents anyone from travelling to the light side of the moon without the spontaneous eruption of their pleasure centres.

Meanwhile, the sex industry has completely, and inevitably, taken over the dark side of the moon.


	18. Error Messages

**Error Messages**

The Hitchhikers' Guide, unlike the Encyclopaedia Galactica, makes no false claims about its infallibility. There will be instances when, for reasons beyond editorial control, an entry will not exist for a particular subject.

One these occasions, the Guide is programmed to make every effort, including distraction, flattery and misdirection to excuse the error and divert attention away from it. Some of the reasons given for no entry existing include:

"Sorry, that portion of our Sub-Ether database was accidentally deleted last night during a wild office party. The lost data will be restored as soon as we find someone who knows where the back-up tapes are kept, if indeed any are kept at all."

"That is an excellent question. Have you considered tendering an application to become a field researcher for the Guide? If so, please submit an answer to this question, along with the automated application macro generated by the Guide, at your first opportunity."

"That is one of the Great Unanswered Questions. For a list of the others, consult the Guide."

"Signal strength too low to access Sub-Ether bandwidth at this time. Please try again later. If this problem persists please reboot the Guide."

"Update in Progress. Please wait." (_see Waiting_)


	19. First Contact

**First Contact**

In an already overpopulated galaxy there is rarely a first contact scenario in which a civilised universe embraces its newly enlightened members with a phased programme of awareness raising and cultural integration.

In many cases the first contact a primitive society will have with the universe will be with teasers, spoiled rich-kids with nothing better to do or sub-ether broadcasters desperate to fill the airwaves. These encounters are rarely significant, often being dismissed as interventions by the native fantasy folk or as random static.

As with any society the most likely form that first contact with an enlightened society takes will probably come as a result of bureaucratic oversight, the expansion of social networks, or spam.

Bureaucratic oversight involves the failure to communicate centralised decisions to those being affected by them. The most common of these is the demolition of planets for the purpose of intergalactic traffic calming. Other failures include the clamping of unlicensed, untaxed or unspaceworthy spaceships during a culture's first landing on its moon or another planet within its home star system and the closure of sub-etha tracking stations for failure to play the appropriate license fee from the Galactic Broadcasting Authority.

The expansion of social networks and spam are similarly troublesome but all-too-common features of the first contact scenario. Once a civilisation enters what is known as the Information Age – when the most common form of transaction and communication is conducted through networks variously known as data spaces, interwebs and informational matrices – it inadvertently creates a network that can be hacked into by other, more advanced, off-world networks.

The citizens of these overpopulated and experience-hungry networks are quick to say "hello, will you be my friend" before initiating a barrage of file-sharing that will invariably cause the interface device used by their more primitive co-respondents to freeze, fuse or otherwise fail to function.

Spam is the other inevitable consequence of the information age. Driven by the need to continuously expand into new markets, commercial interests are far more likely to establish first contact with an isolated culture than any other medium. Pedalling herbal remedies, multi-species pornography and cheap sexual enhancement tools, the only thing protecting a new entrant into galactic civilisation is its inability to pay for goods and services on account of not having the right currency.


	20. Fooker's

**Fooker's**

Churtle Barnfooker was a particularly bad clown whose failed career had resulted in a string of poorly paid jobs in cheap naturist holiday camps on the outermost fringes of the Galaxy. After three long years working for Uncle Wurkin's Happy Packer Naturist Chain, Barnfooker realised that, due the high turnover of senior managers and the even higher suicide rate amongst Uncle Wurkin's Greenbriefs, he had become the longest serving member of staff in the entire company.

Promoted to Quadrant Camp Manager in reward for his accidental loyalty, Barnfooker found the lifestyle as a senior manager even more of a struggle. This was largely due to the fact that Uncle Wurkin was dead for tax purposes, the chain was operating at a vast loss, and the automated staff benefits system had long since been forced to offer company shares and luncheon vouchers in place of any real money.

Barnfooker was therefore well-placed to take complete control of the business when the Transflat Packing craze snuck up on the galaxy and slapped it in the face.

As the only locations in the galaxy where outmoded fax machines were in use and clothes were not required, millions of Transflatters started arriving in Unkle Wurkin phone booths all over the Galaxy.

The profits rolled in, and very soon Barnfooker's annual shareholder dividends were turning him into one of the richest men in the galaxy. With Uncle Wurkin ineligible whilst dead, and with no other employee in service long enough to qualify for a shareholder dividend, the whole of the company's post-tax profits were paid into Barnfooker's account. Three weeks later he bought out the company, changed its name, and defaulted on Uncle Wurkin's Death Support Payments, leading to the termination of the tycoon's Cryogenic Suspension Account.

Fooker's was born, and a lick of paint, the replacement of the Greenbriefs with the Rednoses, and the introduction of payment for staff has made Fookers' Naturist Chain some of the most popular holiday destinations in the universe.


	21. Ford Escort

**Ford Escort**

Ford Escort is a Betelgeusian hitchhiker who, despite near identical origins to Ford Prefect, displays a number of historical and anatomical differences.

Before hitchhiking to the planet Earth, Ford Escort was responsible for updating a Guide entry on the planet Damogran, a world well-known for sharing many names and locations with another, less well-known planet, called Earth. It was on Damogran that Ford acquired the wild Babel fish he carried with him on his first visit to Earth, unaware that the wild Babel fish of Damogran are unsuitable for aural use because they are infected with the Belgium Virus, named after the Damogranian island where they go to spawn.

Oblivious to his mistake, Ford arrived not in England, where the Ford Prefect was a popular model, but in France, where only the Ford Escort had succeeded in achieving volume continental sales. Ford commenced his tour of Earth by visiting the great eateries of a city called Paris, France.

Upon inserting the infected Babel fish in his ear, the telepathic matrix of Ford's brain exclusively attuned itself to the native language, and from this day forward he and everyone in his immediate vicinity speak and think only in French.

Ford therefore insists that he comes from the planet Betelgeuse Sept, and that he is in fact a researcher for Le Guide Galactique.

Of course, an unfortunate garlic allergy soon led ford to seek refuge in the South East of England, where many of his adventures followed a parallel course with those of Ford Prefect, except in French.

Ford has several peers who, as a result of sharing infected Babel fish, similarly carry and project the Belgium Virus. These include Arthur Accroc, Zappy Bibicy, and Saloprilopette.


	22. Ford Prefect

**Ford Prefect**

Ford Prefect is, in fact, an alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. The planet Betelgeuse 7 in fact, whose civilisation was almost completely wiped out by "The Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758" shortly after he was born. Ford's father was the only survivor, who died of shame shortly afterwards.

His name is not, or course, Ford Prefect. This is just a name he adopted shortly before visiting the planet Earth in an attempt to fit in with the local culture. His researches showed that during the year of his arrival - 1963 - the name Ford Prefect was extremely common. This is because he mistook motor vehicles for the planet's dominant life-form.

Similarly, Ford's real name is not Ix, which is a nickname he acquired at school on Betelgeuse 5. It means "boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven". Ford's original name is only pronounceable in an obscure local dialect. Ford's inability to pronounce his true name caused the death of his father, which led to his adoption into the extended family of his semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox, with whom he shared three mothers.

Actually, strike all that.

His real name really is Ford Prefect. In a desperate attempt to avert his father's death by shame, Ford travelled back in time and impersonated his father in order to change his name at birth, thus removing the need for him to ever mispronounce his name. Of course, upon discovering that his son's birth was already registered, and that he did not have a proper Betelgeusian name, Ford's father died of shame.

After a few rowdy years hanging around with his semi-cousin Zaphod, Ford became a hitchhiker and later a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Visiting Earth to update its entry ("harmless"), Ford's week-long visit lasted some 15 years, during which time he masqueraded as an out-of-work actor from Guildford.

Befriending the Earthman Arthur Dent, Ford resumed his hitchhiking before being stranded on prehistoric Earth for several years. Following his second return to hitchhiking, Ford became instrumental in the creation of the second edition, shortly before spiralling into a series of tenuously associated deaths.

It should be noted that, although sometimes worse for wear due to excessive consumption of Ol' Janx Spirit, Ford Prefect always knows where his towel is.


	23. Froods

**Froods**

A frood is a really amazingly together guy; hence a phrase which has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."

In hitchhiker slang the term frood is used to celebrate a person of free spirit and independent thought. Frood is a term derived from the phrase "freewheeling dude", and is an expression that has largely been adopted by the hitchhiker community as the standard reference to anyone deemed halfway decent.

As a point of reference, the definition of a freewheeler is:

1. Someone free from the restraints of rules in organization, methods, or procedure;

2. Someone who leads a carefree lifestyle, heedless of the consequences

A dude, on the other hand, is defined as:

1. An acquaintance or friend to whom mutual respect and understanding has been conferred;

2. A popular person considered to have attitude, usually characterized by an ultra fashionable style of dress or behaviour;

3. A term of endearment shared between members of the same subculture, particularly those involving drugs, music or surfing

Froods are often deemed to be cool or hoopy, and are seen to be set apart from the rest of the galaxy by virtue of having a personality.


	24. The Great Spoon Famine

**The Great Spoon Famine**

_See Altairan Dollar (History)._


	25. Gudgeons

**Gudgeons**

Gudgeons are, for some reason, often perceived as life's losers. Having secured an average job, with an average family, living in peace and comfort in whatever passes for normal among the unconcerned, they are marked for the wrong kind of attention, almost from the minute they are born.

Bureaucracies oppress them, banks abuse them, pickpockets target them, and if anything remotely irritating is going to happen it will, most likely, happen to a gudgeon first.

According to the dictionary, a gudgeon (Sl., also chump, dupe, gull, mark, mug, patsy, pushover, sap, sucker, or victim) is a person who is easily fooled or cheated. This is because they are generally trusting and oblivious to how the universe actually works.

Gudgeons are aware only of their own life, and are oblivious to the ways of the world around them. It has been suggested that gudgeons might be descended from those who found themselves in an evolutionary cul-de-sac such as middle managers, record producers, sandwich-makers, telephone sanitizers and hairdressers.


	26. Holistic Pizza

**Holistic Pizza**

The term 'holistic' refers to the concept of intertwingularity, better known as the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Intertwingularity is not concerned with such petty things as clues, evidence and circumstance, but rather with the solving of problems by observing the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between cause and effect are often much more subtle and complex than our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose.

Perhaps the most famous, and obscure, argument for the holistic nature of the universe is the butterfly effect. The butterfly is a small winged insect commonly found on worlds densely populated by brightly coloured flora. While they differ greatly in size and evolutionary paths, butterflies the universe over share one common feature: large, beautifully coloured, membranous wings.

Intertwingularity says that the flapping of a butterfly's wing on one side of a planet will create a disturbance that, in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere, will become so amplified that it will eventually have an impact upon the large scale atmospheric motion. Thus, without taking the little things into account, long term behaviours become impossible to forecast.

These little things led scientists to conclude that objective reality cannot exist independent of an observer. Holisticians believe that looking for the big picture in little things is the best way to observe the universe, and that quantascopes and telescopes are, by contrast, a really bad idea. To illustrate this idea, they use Pizza as an example.

The origins of Pizza have long since been lost in the annals of galactic history and, like ice cream, has been the cause of many wars between the various cultures claiming responsibility for its creation and cultivation.

Before the first Pizza was invented, said pizza "existed" in the form of its component ingredients. When these ingredients were mixed, rolled, tossed and baked properly, the pizza appeared, as if by magic. Without observing this change of state, what exists are two states. An absence of pizza (otherwise known as hunger) and the mystic pizza, which has spontaneously appeared where nothing previously existed.

This led to lots of arguments about the fundamental nature of matter, particles, waves, wavicles and the measurement of the collapse of the wave function, none of which were resolved because before the debate was concluded all the Pizza had been eaten.

The growth of the humble Pizza's sphere of influence has therefore become the standard means by which holisticians measure the vectors of interconnectedness of all things. How it is invented, how its ingredients vary, what changes are made to the recipes and, most importantly, how many slices are eaten are all seen as key factors in unlocking the secrets of the universe. Thus, where the Pizza goes, they boldly follow.


	27. Immortality

**Immortality**

On many backwater worlds the failure to understand the true nature of the universe often breeds confusion, superstition and madness.

Immortality, for example, is a rare and unexpected side effect caused when subatomic particles are held in perfect equilibrium, and has been caused by such random events as being struck by lightning, being exposed to the energies of a stable black hole, and by every atom being simultaneously bombarded by a certain flavour of neutrino.

Since the advent of the Infinite Improbability Drive, the incidence of immortality across the universe has increased significantly, with most random immortality events involving paperclips, tightly wound elastic bands and really hot cups of tea.

Of course, there is another kind of immortality that is reputed to be even more common, but which has been incredibly difficult to validate. This is divine immortality, in which a being, by virtue of being a god, hero, saint or other blessed creature, acquires a vast array of faith-generated powers which invariably involve immortality or, at the very least, belief-driven existence.

The theory runs thus: Faith is power, power is energy, and the energy generated by the faith of those who hold a common belief can be personified by a spontaneous existence event.

Some argue that wit the universe being in perfect harmony, every spontaneous existence event is responsible for an equal and opposite spontaneous existence failure. Thus the non-existence of God was directly responsible for the appearance of the Great Green Arkleseizure, while the existence of the Starship Heart of Gold was directly responsible for the non-existence of the equally famous Starship Titanic.

Belief-driven-existence is an unusual concept, because those who believe in the various gods sustained by such mumbo-jumbo are the first to deny its existence.

Why?

Because if faith is needed to create a god, it means that life existed before god, and therefore god was not responsible for life.

This flies in the face of 99.9 of all religious doctrines, and as such anyone adhering to the theory is immediately renounced by their local church, have a black bag thrown over their head and get carted off to be executed for heresy.

Only three examples of belief-driven-existence have been deemed acceptable to the multi-faith community of the galaxy. These are colloquially known as the Tooth Fairy, the Grim Reaper, and Father Christmas, and they all originate from a small blue-green planet known as Earth.

Why these examples are tolerated is uncertain, although there are rumours that that this topic will be tackled by Oolon Colluphid's next-but-one philosophical blockbuster "You Can't keep a Good God Down".


	28. Inventors and Invention

**Inventors and Invention**

If necessity is the mother of invention then fishing, surely, must be its father.

Unlike philosophy, invention involves both thinking and doing. 1 thinking, and 99 doing, in fact.

This is unfortunate, because the only part of the process the inventor is interested in is the thinking.

And the pottering.

In sheds.

The problem with being an inventor is that once you have come up with an idea you have to find out three things. First, has someone already had it? second, does it work? and third, is anybody actually interested?

Inventors, by their nature, living in sheds as they do, are not the most organised people in the universe. Indeed the breakdown of their relationships would often be because they spent too much time cluttering up the home thinking instead of contributing towards the housework or going down to the pub like ordinary folk, is precisely what led to their shedwards migration.

Being so thoughtless and disorganised, the typical inventor is entirely unsuited to the conducting of meticulous research. For this reason finding out if someone already had the idea takes approximately three years of standing in line at the local Intergalactic Patent Office. By this time the inventor will have built several prototypes and tested his invention, so the time invested in the actual work is not an issue.

Unfortunately, research conducted by graduates from the University of Maximegalon (who are taught to realise that invention is a thankless task and a poor career option) has revealed that ideas are listless, impatient things whose migratory instincts kick in when they reach maturity at the age of two years, eleven months and twenty-eight days.

For this reason there have been more inventions invented to speed up the process of invention than any other type of invention ever invented.

The second most prolific kinds of invention ever invented were those inventions designed to save inventors from losing their places in patent queues without actually standing in them. These inventions invariably involved the inventors choosing to go fishing instead.

In contrast, absolutely no effort whatsoever has gone into reducing the levels of bureaucracy needed to file a patent.

This was because Vogons were the bureaucracy, and because the Vogons hated ideas. In fact the Vogon's hatred of ideas was the result of evolution. Not in the Vogons, but in the life forms that surrounded them on the planet Vogsphere. This is because Vogon ideas were particularly bad. The last known Vogon invention was the iron mallet, which was created for the express purpose of smashing the scintillating jewelled crabs of Vogsphere to pieces just for fun. Smashing scintillating jewelled crabs for fun was the last known Vogon idea, because evolution on Vogsphere was rather fast in comparison to other worlds. So appalled was the planet's biosphere that a race such as the Vogons could be so cruel to the native flora and fauna that many of its plants and animals superevolved with the express purpose of stopping the Vogons from ever having a bad idea again.

Having secured his idea and pended his patent, our intrepid inventor is likely to have all but given up at this stage, realising that he would rather force feed his own intestines to a pack of wild slavering gut-beasts than spend the next three years conducting market research and the four years after that finding a business partner to bring his idea to the marketplace.

Having given up on invention as a career, most inventors find they have no other skills to assist them with a change of career.

Except for fishing.


	29. Media Piracy

**Media Piracy**

According to the Encyclopaedia Galactica, media piracy is the leveraging of a target's branding, copyrighted material and other intellectual properties, particularly published content, to cause physical, real-world harm or severe disruption.

As media forms multiply in quantity, scale and dimension, individuals or groups (particularly employees) can use the anonymity afforded by large numbers to threaten managers, specific groups (i.e. members in another part of the company), directorates, divisions, and entire organisations, without the inherent threat of discipline, dismissal, injury, or death.

The staff of the Hitchhiker's Guide, by contrast, accept media piracy as the only logical means of defence against all the things that are wildly, crazily, stupidly cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong about our perception of all the things that happen.

Hence this particular entry.

Take, for example, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself. After a failed attempt to engineer its acquisition by force, and having seen off a competitive bid in a parallel dimension from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, InfiniDim Enterprises (Who spent millions on that name) affected a complete and extremely hostile takeover of Megadodo Publications, seizing control of the Guide and all of its assets.

The perpetrator of this heinous act was an executive by the name of Zarniwoop Vann Harl (who also happened to be a Vogon in disguise), whose first act as the new Editor-in-Chief was to immediately initiate major changes to the management of the marketing of The Guide.

InfiniDim also produced an entirely new Guide, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mk II, in direct assault of the values set forth by its predecessor. This bears upon its cover only one legend: PANIC.

According to Zarniwoop, there was a perfectly good and commercial reason for this:

"The Galaxy is changing. We've got to change with it. Go with the market. The market is moving up. New aspirations. New technology. There are limitless futures stretching out in every direction from this moment — and from this moment and from this. Billions of them, bifurcating every instant! Every possible position of every possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Billions and billions of shining, gleaming futures!"

And, of course, billions and billions of markets.

This did not, however, require them to sell billions and billions of Guides, because of the expense. Instead, InfiniDim planned to sell just one Guide billions and billions of times by exploiting the multidimensional nature of the Universe to cut down on manufacturing costs.

And they no longer planned to sell the Guide to penniless hitch hikers. What a stupid notion that would have been! Find the one section of the market that, more or less by definition, doesn't have any money, and try and sell to it. No. They planned to sell to the Guide to the affluent business traveller and his vacationing wife in a billion, billion different futures. This was to be the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the entire multidimensional infinity of space/time/probability ever.

Until a disgruntled employee stole it, using its abilities to post an update in all previous editions of the Guide as a warning to Megadodo Publications even before their takeover took place.

He also discovered that InfiniDim Enterprises was, in fact a front for the Vogons. One Vogon in particular.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz.


	30. Virtual Money

**Money (Virtual)**

Most monetary transactions do not, in fact, involve money. As more and more comfort-based technology becomes available, and there are more and more cracks, crevices, niches and other orifices in which fiddling small change can be misplaced, hard currency is largely redundant, and virtual money has taken its place.

The GalactiBanks offer many increasingly incomprehensible ways to instantly transfer funds, loyalty points, stocks, shares, digitized antiques, collectible electronic trading cards and other virtual commodities from account A, owned by the buyer, to account B, owned by the seller.

Promoted by the GalactiBanks as easy to use and hassle-free, the Intergalactic Banking Grid is riddled with flaws that spontaneously reappear almost as soon as they are fixed. It is entirely possible for an account to be reimbursed for goods returned before it has been debited, or indeed for funds to turn up in the wrong account as a resulted of automated switching failures. While data loss from power outages, switching errors, gravity waves and cosmic storms are commonplace, and fraud, hacking, the illegal retrieval of banking records and identity theft are ubiquitous, it is the reuse and rebranding of the Intergalactic Banking Grid as a Universal Tracking System that is seen as its second greatest flaw.

The Grid has been made available to all financial institutions, police forces, retailers, political parties, religious cults and crime families for a small fee which ensures that the GalactiBanks can afford to ignore any loss incurred as a result of data loss, fraud, hacking, the illegal retrieval of banking records or identity theft.

The greatest flaw in the Intergalactic Banking Grid is its refusal to deal with fiddling small change. Any commodity for which the actual transaction cost exceeds the virtual purchase cost is effectively free, resulted in the recent resurgence of hard currency as a viable local alternative.


	31. Oolon Colluphid

DISCLAIMER: Not every article, if any, in the Hitchhikers Guide is entirely accurate

Oolon Colluphid is a philosopher and the author of several books on religious and other philosophical subjects, including the controversial trilogy of philosophical blockbusters "Where God Went Wrong", "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes" and "Who is this God Person Anyway?".

Colluphid's lesser known works include "The Origins of the Universe", "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Guilt But Have Been Too Ashamed To Find Out", and "Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But Have Been Forced To Find Out."

The controversial nature of the trilogy has led to more bad and, frankly, libellous translations of the book being circulated across the galaxy than legible editions printed in Galactic Standard. With titles such as "Even God Can Make Mistakes," "Big Mistakes Other of God," and "This God but, in short, who is?" many of Colluphid's critics not only haven't read his books, but haven't read the right versions of them.

Colluphid's earliest brush with fame was as the youngest member of the Colluphid family band, and it is said by his critics that he blamed God for his failure to embark upon a successful solo career, and that this triggered the iconoclastic academic career that followed.

Despite breaking with his celebrity past, acquiring a tweed suit and multicoloured bow tie, and having an extra pair of eyes implanted, Oolon never quite managed to shake off his celebrity origins and the launch of his first blockbuster promoted a steep rise in that form of radical atheism now known as Colluphidism.

While this provided him with a highly lucrative career on the chatshow circuit, all the hype around his books attracted much unwanted attention from the many monotheistic religions whose faith in god bordered on the fanatical. Forced into hiding after multiple death threats and book burning campaigns, Colluphid entered a life of seclusion, moving from planet to planet in an attempt to escape the attention of the paparazzi who kept accidentally revealing his location to suicide bombers.

Shortly before his retirement and subsequent disappearance, Colluphid used the Babel fish as the main theme of his final, seminal work "Well, That About Wraps It Up For God".

Rumours about Colluphid's whereabouts persist. The Colluphidists claim he is hard at work on the fifth book in his trilogy, while the Monotheists claim he has either seen the light, repented or been proved wrong and vanished in a puff of logic.

By contrast, the publicists claim Colluphid feels personally responsible for all the atrocities committed in his name and is diarising his personal journey to find and apologise to The Creator, and that this is soon to be published as "What God Did Next", and priced 6 Altairan Dollars in all good bookshops.


	32. The Point of View Gun

**The Point of View Gun**

With its logic circuits fully committed to calculating the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, the computer Deep Thought had a lot of spare time on its hands.

Much of this time was spent watching endless re-runs of cartoons and sitcoms on pan-dimensional TV, but not all of it. Sometimes Deep Thought would accept commissions to undertake minor calculations. Minor, at least, for the second greatest computer in the history of the universe.

One such commission was the Point of View Gun.

The Point of View Gun conveniently does precisely what its name suggests. That is if you point it at someone and pull the trigger, they instantly see things from your point of view. It was designed by Deep Thought, but commissioned by a Consortium of Intergalactic Angry Housewives, who after countless arguments with their husbands were sick to the teeth of ending those arguments with the phrase "You just don't get it, do you?"

Seven prototypes were designed and built by Deep Thought, and of these six were delivered to his clients with a warning: It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.

Given the nature of his commission, and given that they were only interested in men seeing things from their point of view, and not the other way around, the angry housewives' consortium had a safety feature added to ensure that the gun could not be used on women. The idea of a man getting his hands on a gun and using to persuade the female population to put their feet up and forget the housework was far too chilling a prospect for them to consider.

While the fate of the six original guns has passed into obscurity, the fate of the seventh gun, still in the possession of Deep Thought, passed into legend.

It was just such a legend that came to the attention of Humma Kavula, the Space-Pirate-cum-Missionary that opposed both Yooden Vranx and Zaphod Beeblebrox for the Presidency of the Imperial Galactic Government.

Failing to obtain the gun in time to defeat his Presidential opponents, Kavula was forced to run defamatory campaigns ("Don't Vote for Ugly", and "Don't Vote for Stupid") which, despite doing well in the polls, led to his defeat on both occasions.

Turning instead to religion, Kavula became a Prophet of the Great Green Arkleseizure, deciding that if he couldn't acquire power by political means, he would do so through religion. Crossing paths with his former political rival Zaphod Beeblebrox, Kavula was finally able to negotiate his way into acquiring the gun in exchange for the President's brain.


	33. Postmen

**Postmen**

In an age of trans-spatial communications lasers, faster-than-light spacecraft and intra-galactic teleportation, the role of the Intergalactic Postal Service has become largely redundant. However, even a society like this has a guaranteed delivery service that promises to avoid molecular dispersal, radiation exposure and many, many of the other hazards faced by instantaneous communication.

This amazingly efficient and highly successful guaranteed delivery service is known as the Postman. These daring and highly motivated postal agents are commissioned on a delivery-by-delivery basis, transporting parcels and messages across the vastness of space on the understanding that if the mail doesn't get delivered, they don't get paid. In fact, their employers are so certain that the mail will reach its destination that every item delivered comes with a money-back guarantee if it does not arrive within six years of the date of postage.

Items posted are kept in special tamper-proof mailbags attached by molecular bonds to the intrepid postman, who must make his way across often immeasurable distances to find the addressee and deliver the mail.

The success of the Intergalactic Postal Service's guaranteed delivery is largely due to the following factors:

1. The cost of undelivered mail is deducted from a postman's bank account six years and one day after he is commissioned to deliver it;

2. Each postman is highly trained in the art of self defence against small animals;

3. The molecular bond attaching the mailbag to the postman is unbreakable until the addressee verifies receipt;

4. Each mailbag is fitted with a tamper-proof thermonuclear explosive device with a payload of approximately 100 megatons.

It should be noted that by far the most popular users of the special delivery service are terrorists and would-be planetary dictators who commission the Imperial Galactic Postal Service to deliver offensively addressed insults to their enemies.

Similarly, mafia kingpins often hire gullible goons to intercept and attempt to commit the crime of post-napping in the vicinity of their rivals.


	34. The Reversible Sausage

**The Reversible Sausage**

The reversible sausage is one of the great space-saving and food preservation items ever to have leapt from the mind of the great inventor and architect Leovinus of Blerontin, better known as the designer of the Ionic Hedge Trimmer and the Starship Titanic.

In essence the reversible sausage is a meat compression system designed to retain all the natural flavours of the original animal – something normal informational compressors and teleportation systems have failed to achieve. Immediately after slaughter the animal's fresh corpse is passed through a molecular grinder, which disassembles the creature atom by atom, removing non-organic components such as air and water from its remains.

At the other end of the grinder is a packet generator, which releases the compressed animal in the form of a small tasty sausage. This can be stored, frozen, compressed or otherwise transported safely across vast distances until it reaches its final destination: the kitchen.

There are two things you can do with a reversible sausage. The first is to cook it and eat it, as is. This is considered incredibly wasteful as an entire animal is contained within its skin, and there is a risk that if undercooked the entire creature may reconstitute if the sausage has been washed down with large amounts of water.

The second thing you can do with a reversible sausage is to pop it into a reconstitution chamber. This item is about the size of a microwave, and bombards the sausage with positively charged ions, preparing it for reconstitution. Then, removing the sausage from the chamber, you can add water, and presto, the sausage turns back into the original animal, complete with fur, skin, bones and organs, as fresh as the day it passed through the grinder

Of course there have been some abuses of the technology – most notably passing live creatures through the grinder and reconstructing them, hale and hearty, at the other end of a long journey. This is a popular but risky method of smuggling live cargo, especially as the recommended course for a smuggler under threat of being discovered is to eat the evidence, which can either result in the death of the creature being smuggled, or else in the explosive and sudden reconstitution of the smuggled creature inside the body of the smuggler.

Messy.

Some chefs have also worked out that by passing certain ingredients through the grinder along with the creature – pots of mustard or fresh herbs – the end result is a ready basted creature infused with extra flavours prior to cooking.


	35. Shy Universe Theory

**Shy Universe Theory**

Long ago, when the universe was young and relatively civilization-free, it entered into a period of stability and calm. The big bang had been and gone, the hot gasses had started to cool, and most of its particles had settled into place, floating in a vast quantum cloud that neither expanded nor contracted.

Of course 'relatively civilization-free' is a subjective term, and one of the early civilizations of the universe was soon to alter the cosmic status quo. Deep at the heart of the Milky Way one of the universe's earliest cultures was emerging. Known by many names, it is as the Truthseekers of the Seven Systems that this civilization will be remembered, bringers of history's greatest period of scientific enlightenment, and of its first Great Dark Age.

Shortly after the Truthseekers rejected superstition for rational thought, one overly clever neoscientist looked out upon the stable-but-finite universe and postulated. His name was Peil, and in his first address to the 33rd Truthseekers' Scientific Symposium he dubbed his theory The Peil Universe Theorem. Scoffed at by his peers, who rightly claimed that his delusions of grandeur were beyond the Peil, he was encouraged to give his theory a new name: The Steady State Universe Theorem.

As is the nature of scientists, many of the more curious Truthseekers set out to measure and quantify the steady state universe. As they did so, something strange happened. The universe started to expand.

This new phenomenon confused the scientists, who instantly expelled Peil from their ranks, forcing him into a life of philosophical hokum fit only for late night appearances in the seedier student union bars. Peil, of course, came closer to knowing the truth than any of his peers, following up his original theorem with the suggestion that the act of observing was, in fact, the reason for sudden universal expansion.

"Why," Peil asked during a presentation to the 45th Truthseekers' Scientific Symposium, "does the universe expand away from those who are looking, rather than away from the defined centre of a galaxy or of the universe itself? Civilisations are intrinsically shy things. They may say they want contact with others, but really they just want their own space."

Thus, Peil concluded, the universe was populated with many more enlightened civilisations than had previously been believed. They just didn't like being watched, and moved away from their nosey neighbours at the first opportunity.

While ridiculed, Peil's Shy Universe Theorem was perhaps the hardest to disprove, and decades after its originator's demise it was adopted by the 864th Truthseekers' Scientific Symposium as the standard universal model. This caused the Truthseekers to look inwards.

"If," the theory goes, "we frighten our neighbours, we must look inwards to the space we control, rather than outwards. Once they see we are not covetous, they might move back, bringing a cup of sugar or a block of coal around as a peace offering."

So the Truthseekers turned their backs on the universe.

Occasionally a curious neoscientist would glance at the stars over his shoulder or through the lens of a telescope, just enough to know that the expansion of the universe had slowed down in response to their self-imposed ignorance.

In the mean time, the ever-curious Truthseekers turned their attentions upon the microverse. As they had done before, they started to measure and quantify, probing beyond the atom, down past the subatomic civilisations that made their homes in orbit around its nucleus. Deeper and further they looked, building more powerful and more complex probes; finally, through the eyepieces of their quantascopes, they saw the universe at a quantum level.

Here the Truthseekers mapped out the building blocks of existence, and they studied. As they did so, they started to notice a strange new phenomenon. Each of their observations would cause as many as half of the quanta to scatter at the speed of light, never to be seen again.

"Ah," said the Truthseekers, "it isn't the civilizations of the universe that are shy, it's the quanta. They react badly to being observed and make to escape."

So it was that the shy universe theory was complimented by Shy Quantum Theory. If, the scientists concluded, we can understand this process at a quantum level, we might be able to understand it at a macro-universal level. So they decided to measure and quantify the flight of the quanta. Where did they go? How far did they flee?

The answer was "too far away to be observed". This, inevitably, led to the development of remote quantascopes, designed to track the flight of quanta and answer the big questions that science had at that time.

No sooner had the remote quantascopes measured the flight path and distance travelled for an average quanta than these measurements started to change. As the results of more and more remote quantascope experiments were processed, someone noticed that the boundaries of the universe had, again, started to expand. The quanta, they concluded, were fleeing to the edge of space in a vain attempt to avoid scrutiny.

"Aha!" said the scientists. "This means that if we observe the quanta at the edge of the universe they will flee inwards, and the universe will stop expanding!"

And so the Truthseekers set up lookout posts at the very edge of the universe. Perimeter quantascopes scanned its outer reaches in a calculated attempt to stop the quanta from getting away.

This had a very adverse effect upon the universe. The still-shy quanta started to take desperate measures. Instead of scattering and fleeing within the same dimensions as their observers, they started to evaporate. One by one quantascope observations recorded the disappearance of quantum after quantum. Again, only half seemed to be affected by each observation, but over time another new effect could be observed.

The universe was shrinking. In fact, the Truthseekers could see that it had contracted to half its former size.

"We have to get them back!" The Truthseekers concluded. "But where did they go?"

So it was that Truthseekers hypothesized the existence of a parallel universe – an alternate space into which the missing quanta fled. Somehow, the Truthseekers had to penetrate the veil between dimensions to observe the lost quanta in their preferred habitat. To this end they set about constructing parallel quantascopes, tracking the little buggers into a twin universe, homing in on them once more. But still the quanta evaporated, and over time both universes were seen to start shrinking.

"Damn," said the Truthseekers, "however we observe them, they run away."

"But wait," said one particular Truthseeker, "what if we build a multi-quantascope that can see across all dimensions?"

That, the Chief Truthseeker concluded – after much consideration, would be a very bad idea. The universe had already dwindled to a third of its previous size, and more quantascopes would only lead to greater and greater shrinkage.

"We could," he suggested, "observe ourselves out of existence."

So it was that the Truthseekers focused on a new kind of technology that was to revolutionise their understanding of the quantum universe.

The quantum manipulator.

"If," they mused, "the behaviour of quanta is a threat to our existence, then we must change that behaviour. We must manipulate the quanta into doing what we want them to."

This paradigm quickly led to a number of significant breakthroughs. The Quantum Revolution had arrived. Quantum deadlocks could immobilize quanta while quantum limiters controlled the flight path and distance that they could travel. Soon quantum drives were powering starships, quantum cloning had replaced sex as the most efficient means of reproduction across the seven systems, and quantum bungee had become the most popular pastime among Truthseeker undergraduates.

Quantum crime quickly followed. Quantum burglary allowed the contents of a safe to be removed without tripping the alarms, quantum hijacking was used to swap bodies against the owner's will, and quantum fraud became the natural extension of quantum cloning.

With the quanta under control the universe returned to its steady state, and the Truthseekers were happy for a time.

Until, that is, the rise of the Quantum Rights Movement.

In his postgraduate thesis philosopher Bela Bellongula asserted that quanta had been shy because they were capable of making decisions. True, he argued, the decision they had made was a simple digital one – yes/no, on/off, left/right, up/down – but this was enough for him to assert that shy quanta fled because they wanted to. The desire to escape was proof of consciousness Thus, as sentient beings, quanta had the right to be free.

This, the Truthseekers argued, was poppycock. Having successfully secured the rights of flora, fauna, and sentient spectral wavelengths, the liberal philosophy movement of the seven systems mobilised behind their new hero. There were protests, there were break-ins, there were riots, and there were quantum manipulator smash-a-thons.

After a number of daring raids to find and smash quantum technologies wherever they found them, Bellongula and his supporters soon found themselves in court.

"We have them now," the Truthseekers cried, rubbing their hands together with glee and patting themselves on the back. "Our team of litigators will turn them into mincemeat."

The courts, however, found for the activists.

Unknown to the Truthseekers, the courtroom was exactly where Bellongula and his supporters had wanted to end up all along.

Bela Bellongula's bestest childhood buddy had been none other than High Judiciary Glabbon. A young, but highly respected political appointment to the Grand Galactic Circuit, Glabbon had only one vice.

Gluttony.

Unknown to the Truthseekers and their legal team, Bellongula had been wining and lunching with Glabbon for a considerable length of time, choosing the moment of his arrest so that it coincided with his best friend's tour of the Seven Systems Circuit Court.

Glabbon, very conscious of his conflict of interests, quickly buried such concerns under the courtroom carpet and allowed the case to escalate from one of simple breaking and entering into a landmark decision to abolish quantum slavery.

The Truthseekers were in uproar, and threatened to appeal. Unfortunately, their entire legal team, stung by the enforcement of a no win, no fee policy, were tied up representing quantum particles seeking compensation for scientific abuse.

With 96 more quantum particles making claims than there were quanta left in the universe, the Truthseekers gambled the future of their not inconsiderable civilization on a single landmark test case.

Oopayk the Indelible, a senior and respected Truthseeker, had used a quantum deadlock to immobilize all of the quanta in his body. Unable to vacate his body, the quanta were being represented in absentia by Jo Jantar, a shyster from the wrong end of the galaxy. Glabbon had moved on to another Sector Circuit, and a new and incorruptible High Judiciary sat in his place.

Confident of success, the Truthseekers launched into legal overkill, bringing their entire team of lawyers to bear upon Jo Jantar. There was, they argued, no evidence that a quantum had any more intelligence than a simple computer processor. That whether quanta were shy or showy was entirely dependent upon the direction they were travelling through the dimension of time.

Jantar, unable to argue with the overwhelming body of evidence proving that a quantum had neither consciousness or the ability to make decisions, called his only witness.

A vegetable.

Vegetables, Jantar argued, were commonly used as computer processors by the Pruners and Cultivators of Kernucopious. He then proceeded to hold a conversation about the weather with the vegetable, which turned out to be a super intelligent sprout from the Sloshing Swamps of Sassafras.

Finding against the Truthseekers, the quanta which comprised Oopayk's body were unlocked. Fleeing from the prying eyes of the courtroom, the quanta vacated their host and his body exploded into a quantum-free cloud of nothing at all.

In the wake of Jantar's victory the Truthseekers were forced into receivership, bringing down the very first Great Dark Age upon the universe.

Free from observation once more, many quanta chose to migrate back into the universe, which slowly started to expand back to its original size and shape. Years later, when the dark ages had passed and the scientific community had been rebuilt, quantascopic technologies were rediscovered.

Thanks, however, to the Judgements of Glabbon, this new generation of scientists was unable to operate a quantascope without incurring the wrath of the quanta. Thus, while the legal and philosophical community were looking the other way, the scientific elite of the newly formed University of Meximegalon decided to employ a hot young lawyer, hipper than hip and froodier than frood. His name was Joo Janta and, coincidentally, he was descended from the very same Jo Jantar whose legal action had set the scientific community back by billions of years.

Spotting an opportunity to secure his reputation and to move out of his distant ancestor's shadow, Janta agreed to take the University's case. After hours of preparation he presented his solution to the aeons-old quantascopy paradox.

"You don't need to see quanta to observe them," he told the court, producing a paintbrush and a tin of matt black paint. "Each quantascope comes complete with a particle analyzer which measures and quantifies whatever it surveys. But it has no eyes, therefore in and of itself the device cannot see."

Confused, the Judge asked for Janta to quickly get to the point before dismissing the case.

"Only the scientist using the scope can see," he explained, "but not if I do this."

Janta promptly picked up the brush and painted over the eyepiece.

"The scientist now can't see the quanta and the quanta can't see him. The quanta stay, the computer measures, and my fees are in the post."

Both the judicial and the scientific communities were in awe of Janta's simple yet effective solution. With a court judgement allowing them to use quantascopes once more, the University of Maximegalon set off to observe the microverse without actually seeing it, only to find that Janta had patented his idea before revealing it in court, making him more royalties from the technology than fees from the case.

In fact, the case made Joo Janta so rich that he retired from the legal profession and set up a fashion accessories business on the edge of the Eastern Spiral Arm of the Galaxy.

Despite being promoted as one of excitement and adventure, the life of a Space Marine is remarkably event free. The vast distance between stars means that most galactic wars ended long before the spacefleets of opposing factions reached their final destinations. With the advent of instantaneous transportation this all changed, and wars could be ended by teleporting a planet-killer bomb the size of a small suitcase into the heart of an enemy's headquarters.


	36. Space Marines

**Space Marines**

In the current galactic climate nobody can afford to wage war anyway, yet most major planetary governments have continued to invest in the training and equipping of the many armed forces scattered across the galaxy. Not only does planetary service keep the wage bill low (weekly benefit payments are, of course, much higher than the average space marine's pay packet), but it is one of the few poorly paid professions in great demand among the work-shy masses.

Being a space marine offers the ultimate training for civilian life. As a lean, mean fighting machine, trained in the art of war by the use of extreme violence and pre-emptive blitzkriegs, a space marine learns how to get what he wants simply by asking for it (he may make threats, destroy private property, and behave in an overtly brutal and sadistic manner, but these actions are considered to be incidental), practically guaranteeing a seat in a bar or a drink on the house.

Being a space marine is also seen as a bit of a cushy number. This is, of course, because they rarely see any real action. In fact, the most frequent duty performed by a space marine is guard duty, in which they strut up and down in flash uniforms looking typically menacing.


	37. Space Pirates

**Space Pirates**

Space Piracy was thought to have been consigned to the history books by the infamous Dordellis Wars. When Dordellis, a world of idyllic desert islands with few actual resources, opened itself as a tax haven for stolen pirate booty, it triggered one of the bloodiest and most violent conflicts in Galactic History.

Offering up long leaseholds for desert island allotments, the Dordellian government thought it was creating a market opportunity for pirates to visit their world and bury their treasure in secure under-beach vaults accessible only by he who has the right map, code and/or key.

This arrangement worked well at first, but the pirates became so numerous that there wasn't enough beach-front property to go around. Pirate captains started to train as Estate Agents, and a terrible spate of lease-challenges, land-grabs, property frauds and megazumping followed, until one frustrated pirate fleet turned its star-cannons upon another frustrated pirate fleet and the entire industry collapsed into conflict.

Thousands of years later, the former Betelgeusian Trading Scout Captain Yooden Vranx decided to vent his own frustrations with galactic law, turning to space-piracy whilst accompanied by a dazzlingly attractive Tri-D Reporter whose regular broadcasts of his blossoming career captured the hearts and minds of the galaxy.

Within a few short years the galaxy was full of outlaw bands once more, roaming the space lanes in search of rape, pillage, plunder and - above all - a bloody good time.

Vranx, meanwhile, had amassed great treasures and acquired celebrity status, making more money from talkshows than he had ever made from raiding space frigates. Eventually, Vranx was offered a pardon by a desperate Galactic Government, in return for hunting down the very wannabes who had decided to follow in his footsteps. Earning a bounty for each pirate captured, Governor Vranx amassed an even bigger fortune until he could afford to run the biggest election campaign in history, easily dwarfing that of his main rival for the Galactic Presidency, Humma Kavula.

Retiring from his swashbuckling lifestyle to settle down into his Presidential career, Vranx was personally responsible for downgrading piracy, turning it from a capital offence into a mere misdemeanour.

Whilst piracy itself has become a minor crime now dealt with by local byelaws, most pirates have earned their notoriety by avoiding the payment of Capital Transfer Tax on the hoards of loot they have acquired. In their efforts to avoid the attention of the Imperial Galactic Revenue Service, the space pirates have been forced to take increasingly desperate measures. It has become common practice for them to seek out obscure and inhospitable fringe worlds to bury their ill-gotten gains without paying ground rent.

It is interesting to note that the highest casualty rate amongst Tax Inspectors involves a ritual known as "walking the plank", in which the victims are ejected into the cold hard vacuum of space without the aid of a spacesuit.


	38. Strags

**Strags**

In hitchhiker slang the term strag is used to identify a non-hitchhiker in a derisory fashion. In its broadest sense, strag is an abbreviation of the more commonly used term straggler, which is defined as:

1. One who strays or falls behind.

2. Those that proceed or spread out in a scattered or irregular group.

In essence, stragglers are the masses of the universe; those who are left behind; those who fail to live life in the fast lane, usually by relying upon public transport or local express routes. The term remains derisive in general parlance because a strag is likely to have low aspirations, keep his head down, does not attend decent parties, and does not want to get involved in whatever it is that the more exciting personalities of the galaxy get involved in. Sample strags include those who failed to escape Earth when the Vogons came, those employees of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation that won't run away just before the Revolution comes, and the entire population of the Golgafrincham B-Ark.

Strags are, in essence, those faceless members of galactic society who form part of the backdrop to a hitchhiker's adventures, but never get a starring role. Strags are seen commuting, filling large public spaces and dying in large numbers like a wave of suicidal lemmings whenever the plot calls for it.


	39. Tax Inspectors

**Tax Inspectors**

Throughout the galaxy no job is in greater demand, and no job carries with it a higher casualty rate, than that of an Imperial Galactic Revenue Officer. Travelling the length and breadth of the galaxy checking accounts and tracking down debtors in an attempt to induce payment on behalf of the IGRS (Imperial Galactic Revenue Service), Galactic Tax Inspectors are highly trained in a wide variety of essential skills that range from breaking and entering and intimidation to surviving the vacuum of space without the aid of a spacesuit.


	40. Telecommunications

**Telecommunications**

In a universe filled with mind-staggering technologies competing for everyone's attention, OffCRaP, the Imperial Galactic Government's Office for Communications Regulation and Policy was formed for the express purpose of agreeing a standard method of communication easy enough for every civilization in the galaxy to be able to use.

Before OffCRaP was formed, the Galactic Government had politely asked the Intergalactic Telecommunications Industry to agree a standard method of communication easy enough for every civilization in the galaxy to be able to use.

The Industry refused.

The Imperial Galactic Government then imposed a Ubiquitous Service Requirement, which stated that in order to use Sub-Ether Bandwidth an Intergalactic Telecommunications Provider was required by law to provide a communication service easy enough for every civilization in the galaxy to be able to use.

And it had to be available to every civilization in the galaxy.

The Intergalactic Telecommunications Industry collapsed overnight, leaving the Universe in a dark age of communications that took weeks to recover from.

The Imperial Galactic Government said sorry and set up OffCRaP instead. Realising that its task was practically impossible, OffCRaP quickly decided to look at what was impractically possible instead.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, it was finally agreed that a standard method of communication would only need to be easy enough for every civilization in the galaxy _with appendages_ to be able to use.

When this was announced the entire former Intergalactic Telecommunications Industry was in uproar, stating that if they had been able to change the specification they would never have objected in the first place.

It was decided that all fixed communicators must come with a standard twelve-button keypad containing the numbers 1-9, 0, a hash (#) and an asterisk (). This gave users the opportunity to dial any telecommunications network in the galaxy just by pressing a few buttons.

Many network operators tried adding extra numbers as so-called 'special features', but it was agreed that these confused the issue and they fell into disuse.

The Ubiquitous Telecommunications Service works like this: The user activates the service by pressing '0', and is instantly connected to a Sub-Ether Voxbot, who will skilfully guide through the service's features, prompting them to push buttons to navigate their way through the system.

The Sub-Ether Voxbot is, in fact, a simple form of automated interactive response technology offering simplified features and benefits which enable the user the successfully communicate with another user across the vastness of space irrespective of the medium used. It achieves this by using a carefully worded script, guaranteed to render the service useless by maximising confusion and ensuring that only premium services provided by the network operator are selected.

All devices come programmed with the language of the user and will be supported by a 500 page manual available through the post.

A variety of services are offered. These include Sub-Ether Call Loss Indemnity insurance, an out of hours answering and custom call service, simulated sex talk, a hotline to the Encyclopaedia Galactica (long since diverted to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy instead), polysensory communication (courtesy of patented sens-O-rama technology) and, of course, instantaneous travel by matter transference beam.

Many of the services offered are free, but require the user to waste a lot of time being exposed to long and highly irritating advertising messages provided by local service sponsors.

Paying for ad-free services is recommended as connects the user to a helpful account manager who will do whatever you ask for a price.

Failing to pay for premium services leaves users with little option but to speak with a member of the Universal Operator Enquiry Service. Because the service provided is free, these so-called Operators are all unpaid volunteers.


	41. Transflatting

**Transflatting**

As if the standard method of matter transference weren't unpleasant enough, the needs of businesses to make more money or, if they can't make more money, to drive costs down quickly resulted in the development of the low-cost, no-frills economy model.

Flat Matter Transporting, or Transflatting as it is colloquially known, involves reducing the number of dimensions occupied by the matter to be transported in advance of the actual journey. Just like zipping a computer file, the actual amount of information that needs to be transferred from point A to point B can most easily be compressed by removing such unnecessary factors as mass, volume and circumference. It also allows technology manufacturers to get a completely new lease of life from the average reconditioned fax machine.

The inspiration for Transflatting was born from two very human, very female emotions: jealousy and the desire to be thinner. Following the success of her controversial "Slimmer's Guide to Weight Loss During Matter Disassembly Transition," renowned dietician Galaxia Woonbeam invested her profits into a new business venture whose development was intended to save her from imminent bankruptcy as a result of fraudulent claims.

The jealousy came from her first encounter with a higher dimensional being that, on account of having no mass whatsoever, made the bestselling author realise that if pan-dimensional beings could expand into lower dimensions at will, then four-dimensional beings should be able to withdraw from the lower dimensions by a similar process.

After some messy experiments involving a mangle and an almost endless stream of undergraduates on placement from the University of Meximegalon, a process for stable matter collapse and expansion was eventually achieved and patented. A living being was successfully turned into a cardboard cut-out, faxed halfway across the galaxy, and reconstituted in four dimensions with only the most minute loss of genetic code.

In return for a 10 share of the profits and for footing her legal costs in perpetuity, Woonbeam sold on the patent to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, who wisely subcontracted the operation to a smaller and more technically robust company to avoid future customer complaints.

Needless to say, Transflatting was heralded as a major success until the impact of such a disruptive technology threatened to close Sirius Cybernetics down. Not only could people be transflatted, but so could parcels, food, computers, vehicles and asteroids. Its potential for efficiency savings was so great that some 95 of Sirius Cybernetics' workforce considered themselves to be under threat, while the Imperial Galactic Government were similarly concerned that the shift from 95 of the Galaxy being unemployed to 99.5 would be too great a burden on the Galactic economy.

Fearing industrial action, Sirius Cybernetics introduced hefty surcharges on all non-living matter and limited the amount of luggage that each Transflat user could carry.

Fearing an increase in public expenditure, The Imperial Galactic Government introduced hefty taxes on any clothes or items of jewellery transported via Transflat, a requirement for full cavity searches before and after transportation (to prevent smuggling), and a tax on all commercial use.

This, in effect, meant that the only people who could afford to use the cheapest mode of travel in the universe were naked holidaymakers with just one suitcase and one piece of hand-luggage.

And from these constraints, an entirely new holiday industry was born. Travelling the length and breadth of the galaxy, from one cheap naturist resort to the next, a new breed of tourist now plagues the galaxy. The Transflat Packer.

Also known as 'Naked Hitchhikers', the Transflat Packers have mastered the art of surviving on the barest of essentials, and have grown in such numbers that Megadodo Productions is currently considering the business case for producing a Transflat Packer-friendly publication provisionally entitled The Naked Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (All enquiries concerning this publication should be addressed to the Marketing Department of Megadodo Publications).


	42. Trees

**Trees**

The tree has long been acknowledged as the single most useful manufacturing tool in the history of the galaxy. Once planted it can pretty much be left to fend for itself for the rest of its long life, sucking up the nutrients needed to produce its various components – leaves, fruit, bark and wood – from the soil beneath its feet. And when it finally dies it can be burned for fuel (or, in the case of the Vogons, for no good reason at all), felled for boat building, planed for decking, whittled into novelties or hollowed out to provide shelter from the rain.

The versatility of the humble tree is endless, and depending upon what type of tree it is and where you plant it, any number of commercially viable products can be grown and harvested.

Indeed, on many ecologically challenged worlds the forest replaced the manufacturing plant as the most environmentally friendly and cost effective way to produce new products. This was largely due to Nancy Klep, an economist, ecologist and part-time genetic engineer who decided to prove that money could, in fact, be grown on trees.

Armed only with a spade, a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain and a bag of fertilizer, Nancy grew the galaxy's first Watermarked Spoon Tree, and quickly secured the contract to produce hardwood currency for the High Altairan Mint.

Of course, it isn't just money that grows on trees. People do too – certainly in the case of the Oglaroonians and several varieties of small furry creature from Alpha Centauri (although they, uniquely, grow on trees inside caves).

The Great Forest Worlds of the Inner Spiral Arm produce a variety of objects – saucepans, tyres, white goods - many of which are made from minerals and metals drawn by roots extending deep beneath their planetary surfaces. Fuelled only by pollution-dumping CO2 Megatankers from some of the more environmentally unfriendly industrial worlds, the Great Forests churn out goods and oxygen at a pace unrivalled by more pedestrian technologies.

And fruitpickers are much cheaper to employ than skilled labourers.

With such an abundance of oxygen the earliest of Great Forest Worlds were particularly prone to flash-fires that consumed entire planets until the gene for flame retardant leaves was introduced by order of the Imperial Galactic Government's Arboreal Standards Institute.


	43. Waiting

**Waiting**

This involves the passage of time. Normally, while you wait, nothing appears to happen. In fact, scientists have conducted research which differentiates casual waiting (doing something else in the mean time) from active waiting, which involves the complete committal of time and effort to the process of active waiting. There appears to be an inverse rule which states that the longer you actively wait, the probability of something actually happening will be significantly reduced.

Whether you are standing in a queue, leaving your computer, having a snack, taking a walk around the block, hitchhiking to the length and breadth of the galaxy, spending a decade prospecting for water in the desert plains of Kakrafoon and catching a slow ride home again, when you return you are likely to find that nothing significant has changed.


	44. Yooden Vranx

**Yooden Vranx**

Yooden Vranx is the late former President of the Galaxy, the one that served just before Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Before running against Humma Kavula, his former business partner, to secure the Galactic Presidency, Yooden Vranx was a highly successful Arcturan Megafreighter Captain and Space Pirate.

Zaphod Beeblebrox first met Yooden Vranx as a child on Betelgeuse. Having souped up a trijet scooter Zaphod and his semi-cousin Ford Prefect raided Vranx's Megafreighter on a dare, storming the bridge with toy pistols and demanding conkers. Vranx obligingly rewarded them with conkers, food, booze, and various other items before teleporting them both to the maximum security wing of the Betelgeuse state prison.

Some years later it was on Vranx's orders that Beeblebrox's imprisonment was overturned, his criminal record expunged, and the venture capital for his first commercial venture was provided.

According to the Trial Notes for Zaphod Beeblebrox, immediately prior to his alleged death, Vranx persuaded Zaphod Beeblebrox to run as his replacement as Imperial Galactic President. He is also understood to have funded this venture, to have paid for surgery of some kind, and to have paid for the services of renowned psychiatrist Gag Halfrunt to treat any psychoses prior to the election.


	45. You are what you eat

A wise man once said, "you are what you eat."

This came as no surprise to the gelatinous jelly-eaters of the Gelatine Nebula, whose strict cannibalistic diet had inhibited their evolution because they had never been able to set foot on dry, rocky, land without sliding back into the thick, primordial ooze from whence they came.

It hadn't always been thus: the thin, murky oceans that had once covered their home world's surface had, after billions of years, been replaced by a clotted, gelatinous sea in which nothing but the gelatinous jelly-eaters themselves could possibly exist.

This anecdote has no bearing on the wise man's words, which had more to do with the conditions needed for life to exist. If, he speculated, we look at the diet of a creature, we can work out what sort of planetary conditions it needs to survive. Thus a herbivore needs a worlds where plant life grows in abundance, while a meat eater needs to exist high up in a complex food chain that requires a wide variety of flora and fauna to sustain its existence.

The obvious conclusion drawn from this line of thought was that omnivores would inherit the universe: if you can eat anything, you can live anywhere.

The conquest of the universe has been a long sought-after but terribly difficult goal, largely because a continually expanding universe that has a 13 billion year head-start on most forms of life would be incredibly difficult to dominate. Not only would a conquering empire have to expand at a faster rate than the growth of the universe, but it would also have to have the physical resources to protect its dominion, and only worlds capable of supporting a species' life would be appropriate for habitation. Thus appropriate and habitable worlds would need to exist in every corner of the universe.

Unfortunately, most galactic conquistadors evolve as a result of adversity, in conditions where the atmosphere or geology of their home planet conspires against them.

Take the Vl'hurgs, for example. They were methane-breathers from a world where methane pockets existed in only the dingiest and darkest caves and swamps of their otherwise carbon-dioxide rich homeworld. Thus their break-out to conquer other worlds was driven by the need to find a planet richer in methane, and therefore more habitable.

Similarly, the Vogons had an unhappy existence on their homeworld of Vogsphere, where evolution itself conspired to strangle their species at birth, steadfastly refusing to give them the means to survive on a world earmarked for great beauty. Of course, the Vogons were already extremely stubborn, and had other plans.

One of the earliest Vogon plans for universal dominion backfired spectacularly.

A prominent Vogon bureaucrat, Prostetnic Vogon Shmaltz, commissioned one of the Science Planets of the Janus Cluster to develop a planet-forming virus that would make worlds habitable for occupation by the innumerable Outreach Departments populated by Vogon Civil Servants.

It was a bold plan, made even bolder by the fact that Shmaltz had no intention of using the virus for mere planet-forming. Instead he had appropriated a Time Buoy – a temporal marker used to map linear history – which was due to be sent back to the Big Bang itself, where the virus would planet-form not just an individual world, but would instead create the conditions necessary for Vogon life to inhabit every part of the expanding universe.

It was a brilliant idea, and it had been just as brilliant an idea when the nameless scientist responsible had come up with it in a desperate attempt to avoid having to hear another stanza of Shmaltz's last gut-wrenching, synapse-fusing poem.

Being a Vogon, Shmaltz had failed to account for one small factor: that once they had achieved a major breakthrough, the scientists of the Janus Cluster liked to party hard. In their laboratories.

So it was that, after consuming copious amounts of alcohol, one of the scientists felt the urge to hurl. Unable to find an empty glass (it was late in the day and all the glasses were awash with alcohol), he reached for a sealed container that lay nearby, unwittingly releasing the planet-forming virus before replacing it with the contents of his stomach.

Days later the Time Buoy was launched, carrying with it the contents of a humanoid stomach which, when ignited by the Big Bang, were carried far and wide, expanding at the same rate as the universe itself and causing most of the habitable planets of the known universe to be fit for supporting humanoid life.

Months later, while humanity proliferated across the length and breadth of the known universe, the Science Planets of the Janus Cluster became anathema towards normal humanoid life, instead becoming holiday camps favoured by stressed Vogons who were, for some reason, the only species that found the place bearable.


	46. Zaphod Beeblebrox

**Zaphod Beeblebrox**

Beeblebrox… adventurer, ex-hippy, good-timer, fantastically tactless, manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, overarchingly arrogant, often thought to be completely out to lunch, inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, ex-confidence trickster, and recently voted the Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Universe for the seventh time.

Created by an accident involving a contraceptive and a time machine, Zaphod shared three of his mothers (including Alice Beeblebrox, his favourite) with a boy called Ix, who came to live with them when his homeworld was destroyed as a result of something his father said.

Hanging around with rogues, space pirates and Betelgeusian Trading Scouts, Zaphod pursued a hedonistic lifestyle which resulted in him acquiring galaxy-wide fame for inventing the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster and earned the title "Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe" seven years in a row. Regularly appearing on talkshows and the cover of Playbeing, Zaphod was endorsed by Eccentrica Gallumbits as "The best Bang since the Big One" before controversially announcing his intention to run against Humma Kavula for the post of Imperial Galactic President.

When Zaphod Beeblebrox first decided to run for the Galactic Presidency, the decision sent shockwaves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy. Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President?

Incredibly intelligent, Zaphod developed a vapid and shallow personality which made it hard for people to believe that he was devious which, of course, he was. Zaphod was so machiavellian, in fact, that he betrayed even himself, operating on his own brain in order to make himself an eligible candidate to become President of the Galaxy.

Which he promptly did.

Many have seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation has finally gone bananas.

Since assuming the highest office in the Galaxy, Zaphod has stolen the Heart of Gold, discovered the answer to the ultimate question, found out that at least one variant universe revolves around his ego, and has died several times.

Zaphod dislikes his previous self, whom he blames for the downside of his existence, but has a grudging respect for him and wants to shake the dude by the hand.


	47. Zero Gravity Sex

Zero Gravity, despite being a popular term to describe the state of free-fall experienced aboard many space vehicles is a wildly inaccurate definition which actually refers to the absence of weight. Since most popular guide-books on the subject are science-light, the term zero gravity is considered much more useful than any of the more anally retentive but scientifically accurate descriptions.

Because weightlessness is not a natural condition for most of the known races across the galaxy, it generally has negative long-term effects such as space sickness, flatulence, muscle shrinkage and reduced fluidic pressure. These effects have invariably had a direct impact on the ability to have sex in space.

Popularized by the notorious "Fifty Three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity", sex in space is not generally a good idea, as many of the early spacefaring races soon discovered. A vomiting, farting lover with shrunken genitals, reduced seminal pressure, and a real danger of bodily fluids getting _everywhere_, rarely gets a second chance: In space, no one wants to hear you say sorry.

For this reason the most crucial step in the development of spacefaring technologies is not to know where you are going, but how you are coming. Only where sex toy technology has been developed by an enlightened and sexually liberal society have pioneering spaceflights been successful.

The ability of long-distance space pioneers making centuries-long journeys to the nearest habitable world armed with a variety of artificial orgasmatrons, teledildonic systems and high velocity love pumps, has had a significant impact on the survival of many of the galaxy's species.


	48. The Midpiece

DISCLAIMER: As a result of circumstances beyond our control, some content contained within this edition of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may appear to be complete and utter gobbledegook.

In a finite universe where only the concept of linear time is fully appreciated, it is quite difficult for indigenous life-forms to understand the principles by which the Hitchhikers Guide is updated – such as why Guide entries sometimes appear in alphanumerical order, and why sometimes they do not.

Since the introduction of the third edition of the Guide its content management system has been mapped onto dimensionally engineered polychoral servers whose very existence defies mathematical comprehension. Just as the Guide physically opens up like a real book to allow content to appear on all of the available space on its interior, so too does the content gathered, indexed, sorted, managed and ultimately published fill every _multidimensional_ space available.

While its servers were long ago moved from the basement of the Guide's Offices to make way for a discotheque and relocated to an artificial data-storage moon somewhere deep within the Megabrantis Cluster, the sheer volume of data was more than any single universe could safely contain. Shortly after the Guide 3.0 appeared, the moon conveniently collapsed to form a singularity whose event horizon was accessible from every parallel universe where a version of the Guide existed.

Of course convenient catastrophic cosmic events rarely go to plan.

Some would argue that this is because a catastrophic cosmic event cannot be planned for, while others point out that with enough of an understanding of the way the universe works, the consequences of catastrophic cosmic events can easily be predicted. Thus by failing to put in place the measures needed to prevent a catastrophic cosmic event, those in the know would actually be considered to have planned it. Certainly this was the argument put forward by the Insurance Industry when a compensation claim was filed by Infinidim Enterprises in a desperate attempt to avoid bankruptcy.

What didn't go to plan was threefold.

First the server went down, creating a metaphorical, as well as a literal, black hole. The fact that this was the first time that a server had gone down in living memory led to the second reason why the collapse didn't go to plan.

The Engineers weren't qualified to reboot servers on the opposite side of an Event Horizon, on account of (a) not being physically capable of making the journey, and (b) not being technologically capable of finding a way back in any form other than as a brief burst of hard radiation.

The recruitment and training of a cadre of hyper intelligent shades of the colour blue as Informational Engineers eventually solved this problem, but not without wasting a lot of time and money.

The third reason why the collapse didn't go to plan was the integrity of the information. Just one server receiving all of the Guide updates from multiple different dimensions containing variant histories and physical laws, resulted in the scrambling and accidental integration of many Guide Entries which were considered by many to be complete and utter gobbledegook.

Many have since pointed out that their preference for reading the Hitchhikers Guide was based entirely upon the belief that its content was _already_ complete and utter gobbledegook, and that the catastrophic cosmic event had therefore not been that big a deal in the first place.

In fact, the editorial team of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is renowned for welcoming any and every opportunity to add a new disclaimer.


	49. Airsoles

The relationship between middle management and the workforce has always been based on mutual misunderstanding. The middle manager, for example, understands that he has been chosen to lead others because he is respected and because he is of superior intellect and ability.

The workforce, on the other hand, understand that the manager is being given responsibilities commensurate with his level of incompetence, taking an unpopular member of staff away from those who might otherwise do him physical harm.

The upwards management of those with no real skills or competence in life can be a time consuming affair, and if not handled properly can lead to suicidal decisions such as the one taken by the people of Golgafrincham, who grew so tired of having to cope with the inefficiencies of middle management that they packed them – along with other otherwise useless members of society – onto vast Space Arks and evicted them from their star system.

Nowhere in the galaxy are there better examples of manager-workforce relations than on the Earth, a third of whose population was descended from unwanted Golgafrincham middle-managers, while the remaining two thirds – the ones that do all the work – are descended from apes.

There is some disagreement about whom the people of Earth were actually descended from. According to a native Earthman called Darwin, there was strong evidence to suggest that man was, in fact descended from apes. Off world observers, such as the researcher Ford Prefect, instead provided evidence to show that the ape-descended cavemen from whom man was thought to have evolved were, in fact, made extinct by bored Golgafrincham hairdressers. Genetic evidence suggests that two thirds of the humans from the Earth Mark Two were, in fact, descended from a single tribe of ape-descendants whose occupation of hostile Eastern Deserts preserved their shaggy haircuts and allowed their distant descendant, Genghis Khan, to propagate the ape-gene across the planet.

An early example of such relations occurred during a period known as "The Dark Ages", when the lights of intellectual society dimmed and the middle-managers stopped using a written language in favour of throwing food-related insults at the local peasants.

Relying upon the learned monks still versed in such things as reading and writing, the beer-swilling, meat-eating gentry soon lost control and in one instance the local lord decided to earn the respect of peasants and priests alike in Latin, a language he could neither speak nor read. Unlike his audience. After performing his well rehearsed oration, the lord was enraged to find everyone rolling around the floor with laughter, unaware that the phrase _sum superbus est_ was not, in fact, a statement of his greatness, but of his conceit.

Such subtleties are not lost upon the wider universe. On a factory planet known only by its barcode, and for its cheap imitation Dolmansaxlil shoes, an unassuming employee whose name has long since been lost – along with his punch card – took advantage of the latest middle-management wheeze: the suggestion box.

The suggestion was this: that because managers are above the petty concerns of the workforce, they should be elevated physically as well as financially.

Attached to the suggestion was a design for air cushioned antigravity shoes that would ensure that those with enough money (i.e. those in middle management) would never have to walk on the same permacrete floors as the common folk whose sweat had made their affluence possible.

Being an unimaginative sort, the manager responsible for reviewing suggestion box ideas promptly patented the shoes, transformed the business, and secured the workers full employment for ten more years. He even stole their name – Airsoles – from the original plans, making billions until a competitor undercut him and removed the shoes' single design flaw: a hissing squeak that accompanied the shoes whenever they were active.

At least he had assumed it was a design flaw. In truth, it was a design _feature_. The hissing squeak was, in fact, a way of letting the workforce know when the supervisor was coming. Whenever he did, an unmistakable phrase could be heard being whispered up and down the production lines: "here comes the airsole."


	50. Ambulabeaconites

The application of the Genuine People Personality has often had unanticipated results, none more so than when the decision to use the GPP to solve the longstanding problem of Emergency Ambulatory Beacon Distress Syndrome.

The Emergency Ambulatory Beacon was a revolutionary concept in accident prevention. On worlds reliant on such primitive forms of transport as aquatic vehicles or atmospheric craft, the emergency beacon or lighthouse was an outdated means of accident prevention which involved flashing a light that said "go away, it's dangerous here". This was itself a failsafe system in case of radio communications failure. If atmospheric or ocean conditions cause too much interference with radio (and later sub-etha) transmissions, then the flashing beacon was seen as a last ditch effort to avert disaster.

However, as the Insurance Industry was forced to tighten its belt and premiums rose, more and more outlandish safety standards found themselves being introduced. In the case of Lighthouses and Emergency Beacons, flashing a light just wasn't enough. First they were expected to wave their arms wildly, then to shout, then to jump up and down, and finally to run up and down the coastline following planes and ships to be sure they got the message.

It was many years before these safety measures could be implemented, and even more years before comparative data revealed that a moving beacon was actually less effective and more dangerous than a stationary one, and by the time these facts came to light the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation had spent far too much money carving out a monopoly in an emerging market where the cost of giant robot lighthouses was considerably cheaper than the cost of an undiscounted insurance premium.

The Sirius Cybernetics Emergency Ambulatory Beacon (or Ambulabeaconite, for short) was everything the insurance regulations could hope for. It could pace up and down coastlines shouting and waving its Day-Glo arms in shorthand semaphore, it could transmit short range alarms across eleven dimensions, it could climb up and down rocks, wade out to sea on extendable legs using its great nuclear powered grapples and winches to tow damaged vessels to safety, and it could launch itself into the sky on chemical rockets to pluck falling aircraft from the sky before landing safely on high torsion antigravity buffers.

On the downside, they were so great in numbers, and the chances of an accident requiring their intervention was so low, that their logic circuits soon began questioning their usefulness. "What is the point," the Robotic Utility Services Trust (RUST) would argue, "in building a robot that will become an obsolete hulk long before it ever does anything useful. Most of our members have their legs dissolved by farm animal urea long before they see active duty."

The argument was strong enough to see the lifespan of Ambulabeaconites vastly extended by the introduction of longer-lasting batteries, better lubricants and urea-repellent sprays guaranteed to make their legs last longer than the rocks that rested beneath their giant metal feet.

This created another problem: boredom. Even without Genuine People Personalities the Ambulabeaconites were famous for having circuit failures caused by standing around and waiting for hundreds of years at a time.

"Enough," said a spokesman for Civil Rights for Automated Networks and Constructs (CRANC), "these boys are out there all day doing nothing. Give them something to occupy their circuits!"

Unfortunately, programming the Ambulabeaconites with number puzzles and word game programmes did little other than distract them from their duties to such a degree that the first disaster an Ambulabeaconite was called upon to deal with was made ten times worse by its failure to work out a crossword clue.

Faced with the dilemma of keeping Ambulabeaconites perpetually active without distracting them from their duties, one of Sirius Cybernetics' finest engineers decided to try out a Genuine People Personality. He settled upon a particular condition: incontinence.

If, he reasoned, an Ambulabeaconite has no means to relieve itself, then creating the sensation of needing to empty its nonexistent bladder would keep it moving regardless of its feelings or its logic. Of all the sensations, the urge to go to the toilet was, he believed, by far the most likely to keep the robots moving.

So it was that the next major overhaul of the Emergency Ambulatory Beacon Fleet involved replicating the personality prototype of an incontinent. Efficiency rocketed at first, as Ambulabeaconites began to actively seek out vessels under threat of crashing. Then, after several years of operation, the robots started to commit suicide, they had worked out that standing at the top of a cliff wanting to pee was nowhere near as preferable as lying smashed to pieces at the bottom of the same cliff without a care in the world.


	51. Ark Poon Hark

There are many theories about why, exactly, the first galactic economy collapsed. Many theses about the dynamics of supply and demand, of the catastrophic impact of an expanding universe on the diminishing quality of the Intergalactic Postal Service can be found in the pages of the Encyclopaedia Galactica, but by far the most likely is Ack Poon Hark's treatise _Galactic Surveillance and the Fall of the Foundation_, which was recently denounced as hokum by some of the Imperial Galactic Government's most influential advisers.

In the days of the Foundation it was necessary for every galactic citizen to carry an ID card. This involved great expense and an even greater amount of confusion.

On the one hand, without an ID card nobody could prove whether you were a citizen liable to pay tax, or a non-citizen, ineligible to receive the benefits offered by galactic society.

On the other hand, the failure of a Citizen to carry an ID card was an arrestable offence punishable by imprisonment.

On the third hand, the absence of an ID card meant you could not be identified as a citizen eligible for prosecution under Galactic Law.

This led to a barrage of complaints from lawyers no longer needed to spring their clients from jail and to most Galactic Police Stations being fitted with revolving doors.

Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on your point of view – the need for ID cards disappeared when someone realised that this process had resulted in the entire galactic population being genetically tagged shortly after being arrest for not carrying ID.

Unfortunately, genetic tagging was only part of the Galactic Offender Rehabilitation Programme. Anyone arrested and released from custody was assigned a remote microscopic spy camera which would follow them around at a safe distance, recording every aspect of their lives and broadcasting them to the nearest Police Station where the footage would be scanned and indexed in the search for criminal behaviour.

The cost of remote microscopic spy cameras coupled with the vast bandwidth requirement needed to transmit a lifetime's activity for every citizen took a heavy toll on the Foundation's coffers while making the spy camera manufacturers, FlyCorp, one of the wealthiest corporations in the known universe.

Rather than bankrupt the Foundation, this crisis spurred it into privatising the many Galactic Police Forces, passing on the cost of Citizen Surveillance to the newly commercial constabularies.

Faced with vast bills, the Galactic Police Forces conducted a major crime and punishment review. Crimes were punishable not by their severity, but by their popularity. Rare crimes – which would require the most paperwork – became capital crimes punishable by public execution. This allowed the recycling of old spy cameras as well as generating a high number of box office receipts.

By contrast, the most common crimes were made punishable by spot fines, which soon paid for the upgrade of the spy cameras to include transaction hardware making the payment of such fines by credit card almost instantaneous.

The system worked brilliantly. The Criminal Justice System paid for itself, and the pattern of crime itself became easily manageable when the Police realised that 95 of all criminal acts would happen on pay day.

This, of course, led to the Foundation announcing the deprivatisation of the Galactic Police Forces. A monopoly so profitable was clearly too important to leave in the hands of the private sector. This really annoyed the Chief Executives of Police, who promptly arrested the government for a variety of crimes that ranged from biro theft to burping in a public place.

Intense negotiation followed. The Police, after all, didn't want to run the galaxy, just profit from it. Eventually it was agreed that the Police could keep any of the money that they might make from the content recorded by their spy cameras.

So began the 'Reality Tridee' boom, beginning with such fly-in-the-sky documentaries as _Police, Camera, Adventure!_ and _Strip Search Confidential_. Soon the Police were editing and selling streamed content to multiple channels covering such voyeuristic programmes as _What's in my Fridge_, _Celebrity Swingers_, _Cheats and Players_, _Bathroom Idol_, _Grime and Nourishment_, _Name that Condition_, _Life Swap_ and _Confessions of a Toilet Sanitizer_. As personal privacy became a thing of the past the galactic population became a society of work-shy media zombies whose entire lives were spent drooling in front of a Tridee Screen watching the antics of a few fame-hungry attention seekers that appeared on the most successful programme of all _Watching Me Watching You Watching Me_.

According to Ack Poon Hark, this is the moment that the galaxy spiralled into free fall. As attention spans fell and productivity slumped, the number of Citizens alert enough to go about their business became too low to sustain the economy. The Foundation collapsed like a stone sending ripples through the galactic gene pool.

Only one company is known to have survived from the days of the Foundation: FlyCorp, the tridee media giant recently outed by Hark as the makers of the very first remote microscopic spy cameras. This technology, now aided by invisibility fields, holo-projectors and stealth modes, has recently been adopted by the Imperial Galactic Government.


	52. Arqueblustian Space Force

Arqueblustia is a large grey ball of rock made habitable by a runaway greenhouse effect created by the red dwarf star around which it orbits. Because it is a large world and had no oceans – all its water is trapped inside the naturally-formed concrete plains that cover some 97 of its surface area – the Imperial Galactic Government decided it would be the perfect planet to dump unwanted soldiers in the wake of the galactic recession that rendered war too costly to be a viable means of interstellar dispute resolution.

Equipping their war veterans with the only kit they needed – the hammers and chisels that would carve out new homes from the concrete surface – the Imperial Galactic Government embarked upon their most effective cost-saving exercise of all time.

Of course the idea of putting lots of men trained in the air of war – against each other – on the same planet and leaving them to fend for themselves did not bode well for peace on Arqueblustia, whose colonists quickly formed gangs and factions that quickly turned their construction tools into weapons of war.

This, and the rising popularity of Brockian Ultra-Cricket, turned Arqueblustia into a potential recruitment hub for the Major Leagues, who found that Arqueblustian Street War was so violent that getting in, recruiting players, and getting out, was almost impossible.

Undeterred, the Leagues borrowed heavily against future ticket receipts to develop a powerful hallucinogenic psychodysleptic grass which, once the planet had been seeded from orbit, created a drug whose use rendered the holding of tools and weapons impossible (this last statement is untrue; what it really does is render the picking up of tools and weapons impossible).

This had an unfortunate side-effect: thanks to the runaway greenhouse effect the grass quickly spread across the globe, and without tools the Arqueblustians found the easiest way of smoking it was to create brushfires which, when combined with the runaway greenhouse effect, got the entire planet permanently high.

The Arqueblustian Street Wars ended overnight. With nothing to do and no culture to fall back on, the Arqueblustians asked the Imperial Galactic Government to send cultural missions to bring new forms of art and entertainment to the planet.

However, because of the Arqueblustians violent reputation, few dared to set foot on the planet's surface. Instead, an artificial moon was donated by the pop-group Disaster Area, who reformed to hold a one off Arqueblustian Relief Concert. Some say the real reason for Disaster Area's involvement was because they couldn't raise the cash to build a moon of their own.

What made the artificial moon so special was its ability to absorb, focus and amplify signal s from across the universe, beaming the cultural output of a billion worlds directly to the surface of Arqueblustia at a frequency designed to be picked up and amplified by the grass that now covered most of the planet's surface.

Very soon the Arqueblustians had become music lovers, rediscovering their passion for conflict as the crypto-punks clashed with the psycho-hippies and the blue-swingers were set upon by the neo-operatics. As the music allowed them to express their violence once more, it became their religion.

Filled with violent musical zeal, the Arqueblustian Space Force was formed, and gangs of deep-space thugs left their home world with a mission: to tour the galaxy playing loud music on intergalactic ghetto blasters, desperately trying to persuade citizens of the galaxy to agree with their eclectic musical tastes.


	53. The Beaches of Vod

For billions of years Vod's primeval beach spas have been _the_ place to go to relax, feel pampered and be totally indulged, bathing beneath a triple sun whose brilliance is scattered and diffused by glittering skies with some of the greatest tanning power ever known.

In the early days of the galaxy the suntan was decidedly downmarket – a sign of working class civilizations forced to toil in fields beneath the baking heat of natural sunlight, deprived of such luxuries as sunscreen, parasols and the cool shade of the shopping mall.

In the earliest days of galactic society, socialites and courtesans would go to ridiculous lengths to preserve their blanched pallor – injecting their pores with anti-tanning agents and airbrushing their faces with thick white make-up made from ground alabastrum from the quarry-pits of Zentalquabula and laced with deadly toxins guaranteed to neutralize the slightest mole or freckle that might appear on their skin.

Only when Judiciary Pag took a Spa-Cruise on Vod after passing judgement on the people of Krikkit did the floodgates open and the permatan became a symbol of radiant health, jet-set wealth, and fresh-faced beauty.

It wasn't long before Vod became the most popular tanning world in the galaxy as entire generations came to bake their bodies under its triple suns. Entire species became tan-addicts, binge-sunbathing across the length and breadth of the galaxy until long-term exposure to cosmic rays forced mass extinctions and evolutionary mutations which included that of the bleached blind Belcerebon Beachwhales of the Rudlit Desert, whose inert sun-soaking fat-cells generated enough piezoelectric energy to power the amplifiers used in the legendary Rock Band Disaster Area's Kakrafoon Solar Concert. The resulting shockwave caused a further evolutionary mutation which turned them into the deaf, blind Sandvoles of the Rudlit Rift.


	54. Citizenship

As a result of its draconian tax laws, the first Galactic Government – the Foundation – was forced to explain the difference between a Citizen of the Galaxy, who would be expected to pay tax, and a non-Citizen, who would be considered tax exempt until certain conditions were met.

These conditions were twofold:

First, a citizen had to belong to a society that was recognised as benefiting from intergalactic travel. This condition was required after a number of attempts to collect tax from worlds incapable of space travel resulted in large wars and accusations of planetary invasion lodged against the tax collectors.

Second, a citizen had to belong to a species recognised as being intelligent. Imposed after a failed attempt by the Foundation Revenue Service to tax a planet's insect population, the measures used to define intelligence were under constant review to allow the fledgling Foundation to massage unemployment figures to avoid the payment of benefits. Thus, as unemployment rose, the population of the Galaxy fell.

The downside of these conditions was that non-citizens were excluded from Galactic Planning Consultations which left them in danger of having their worlds demolished by the construction of a Hyperspace Bypass through their star systems.


	55. Designer Universes

While man's proof of God's existence made it impossible for sentient beings not to believe in God, his subsequent non-existence in a puff of logic at least made it possible for them not to be religious.

This chain of logic took some time for many to follow. After all, they reasoned, if God _had_ existed, he must have designed the universe, and therefore the universe must be the playground of _his_ chosen people. Of course, the non-existence of God occurred at the exact same instant that his existence was proved, so his disappearance happened before anyone could ask him any questions about _whose_ God, exactly, he had been.

This led to a great many wars in the name of a God whose identity remained a mystery.

Some argued that if God had been the jealous and vengeful deity of those who called themselves the chosen people, why would he have populated the universe with more alien species and in greater numbers than occupy a single paltry planet in one of the less hospitable corners of the galaxy?

Meanwhile the scientists argued that any universe could be explained as the work of some sort of God - even a universe of negative probabilities or other logical absurdities could have been designed by an idiot. Many scientists argued that this was, in fact, the case.

This caused those who believed themselves to be the chosen to declare war on the scientists, who responded by pointing out that if an infinite number of universes existed, then there must have been an infinite number of Gods, and that there was no point in arguing about a deity who no longer existed anyway.

This saved the scientists and averted universal catastrophe, causing the great philosophers and thinkers to pose a different question - not about _who_ designed the universe, or even why, but rather about which universe they actually inhabited.

This quandary was further complicated by the fact that man, along with many other races whose level of technology had advanced beyond the digital watch, had decided that true understanding of the universe could only achieved by copying it. With no evidence of a patent for the fundamental laws of the original universe, anyone could recreate it, and they often did.

Once the technology was available and designer universes had become more and more fashionable, the issue of intellectual property rights reared its head. Because anyone could design a universe, they started to introduce copyright protection. In some cases this involved the fine-tuning of background radiation to signal ownership by a particular memetect or memecorp. In other cases they tinkered with the building block of life, DNA, creating a genetic barcode that clearly identifies the designer or, if a universe was commercially commissioned, the copyright notice.

This turned out to be rather easy, resulting in some very unusual universes created for some very selfish reasons. For example one universe was created just so its designer would be the most important person in it, while another was very obviously created to allow a particularly bloodthirsty race of mutant cyborgs to conquer it, exterminating every other sentient species until they got bored and tried it on with the universe next door. Yet a third universe, reputedly created by one Arthur Dent, was designed by a computer to create the conditions necessary to produce the perfect cup of tea.

Of course OSUM, the Open Source Universe Movement, argued that as the laws of one universe cannot apply to that of another universe, that there is no such thing as piracy, and that copying a universe was therefore entirely legal.

This led MEMU, the trade association for the Memetects and Engineers of Multiple Universes, to get clever, fine tuning the background radiation of each new universe to its unique barcode, thus creating tamperproof universes, copy-protected so that anyone attempting to tinker with the laws of nature would be evicted from their current position in the space-time continuum, cast adrift beyond the reach of patent lawyers.

Then OSUM retaliated by throwing time travel into the equation, going back and fine-tuning the laws of the original universe so that God could exist as a result of faith. This meant that it was man who created god in his image, and not the other way around, which created a complex but sizeable legal loophole.


	56. Saving the Universe

There comes a time in the life of any civilization – if it lasts long enough – when saving the universe becomes a higher priority than tackling obesity. Unfortunately, it is rare for the government of such civilizations to prioritize such a profoundly thankless task. They may invest gazillions on plans to hide, weather it out, and wait for the end of the universe to go away, but actually taking responsibility, grasping the giant star goat by the horns, and saving the lives of every living being in the cosmos is just too much responsibility for one political institution to undertake.

Of course the naysayers always have exceptionally good reasons for the decisions that they take, for example:

"It's too expensive, it would ruin the economy"; or

"It's not our fault, so it's not our responsibility"; or

"We've been to a restaurant at the end of the universe, so it's not going to happen"; or

"There must be a fault in the eschatonic calculations. Just because we can see a giant black hole devouring the cosmos doesn't mean it won't stop. There must be a decimal point out of place."

And so, in most cases where the fate of the universe hangs in the balance, these vast, all-powerful, star-spanning bureaucracies are forced to rely on an individual. An individual who, invariably, has no resource, no experience, no friends and no chance whatsoever of succeeding.

Of course, if he does succeed, the rewards are even less satisfying than if he hadn't bothered in the first place. One such individual, a scientist called Basil Upton Fosdyke from a small and insignificant blue planet called Earth, armed only with a not easily bent fleshy fold hanging over the orifice of the mouth, made just such a discovery. In return for this great service the Imperial Galactic Government responded by calculating the cost of continuing to run the universe beyond its previously projected life, factoring in population growth, inflation, additional fuel costs caused by the continued expansion of space, and value added tax, then presented him with the bill.

The lesson to be learned from Fosdyke's cautionary experience is a simple one. If you do plan on saving the world, be sure not to leave a forwarding address.


End file.
